laconic as himself.
The tension was not just about children and housework. The touchy, vindictive Stalin brooded about the money sent to Sverdlov, and not to himself, as an escape fund. Days after his arrival, he had received neither the hundred roubles promised by Malinovsky nor the fees and the books from Zinoviev. Was Zinoviev disrespecting him? Was Sverdlov double-crossing him?
The Georgian and the Jew, the lost fulcrum of the Bolshevik Party in the Russian Empire, captive in their eight-shack village many time-zones from Europe, soon started to aggravate each other. On one side of their tiny dark room, Sverdlov scribbled about his roommate’s egotism, while on the other Stalin, at his nitpicking, seething worst, wrote to Malinovsky demanding that he sort out what had happened to the hundred roubles:
Five months ago, I received an invitation from a comrade in Petersburg to go there and to find the money for the trip. I answered four months ago but got no answer. Can you explain this misunderstanding to me? Then three months ago, I got a postcard from Kostya [Malinovsky himself offering to “sell the horse… for 100 roubles”]. I didn’t understand it and haven’t received the 100 roubles. Well, then Comrade Andrei [Sverdlov’s alias] got this sum… but I suppose it’s only for him. I’ve got no letters from Kostya ever since. I’ve received nothing from my sister Nadya [Krupskaya] for four months.
Stalin concluded that they had “chosen another man” to spring—Sverdlov. “Am I right, brother? I ask, dear friend, for a direct precise answer because I like clarity just as I hope you like clarity.” {219}
No two men liked clarity less than Stalin and Malinovsky, expert conspirators and dissimulators. But while the former stewed in distant frustration, the latter’s entire world was falling apart. There was a good reason Malinovsky had neither sold the “horse” nor answered Stalin’s letters. Stalin’s “dear friend Roman” was now an “hysterical” alcoholic doubleagent swigging vodka out of a teapot—and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Finally, a new Interior Minister and police director sacked Malinovsky, who resigned from the Duma on 8 May 1914. The Malinovsky case exploded very publicly in the faces of the government and police.
Malinovsky’s strongest defenders in the Party had been Lenin—and Stalin. “Lenin must have known,” Malinovsky said later, but he was wrong. Lenin would not believe the truth. But he weighed up the kudos won by Malinovsky in the Duma and his help in defeating (or removing, by arrest) the Conciliators (including Stalin) to conclude that “if he is a
Stalin, paranoia personified, did not suspect the greatest traitor of his political career. The Malinovsky case played its role in making him—and his comrades—obsessively paranoid. Malinovsky entered the Bolshevik consciousness. Like Banquo’s ghost, he haunted Soviet history. Henceforth, in the Bolshevik world of
On the Arctic Circle, Stalin tormented himself and his roommate about the missing hundred roubles. “There’s a comrade [in Kureika],” reflected Sverdlov. “We know each other very well, but the saddest thing is that in exile a person appears bare, revealed in all his little idiosyncracies. The worst thing is that these ‘little things’ dominate a relationship. There’s little chance to show one’s better side.”
As the winter thawed, the Okhrana again warned on 27 April 1914 that the Bolsheviks were going “to organize the escapes of well-known Party men, Sverdlov and Djugashvili.” Stalin and Sverdlov frequently borrowed Fyodor Taraseev’s boat, but now the Gendarmes banned river expeditions. In May, when the steamboats again plied the Yenisei, Kureika’s tedium changed from an agony of cold to a plague of mosquitoes.
Soon Stalin “stopped talking to me,” wrote Sverdlov, “and let me know that I had to leave him alone and live separately.” Both moved out, Stalin temporarily finding refuge in Philip Saltykov’s
I eat fish. My landlady makes me pies. I have sturgeon, white salmon with battered potatoes and caviar, salted sturgeon, sometimes I eat them raw. I feel too energyless even to add vinegar. I’ve ended all regular life. I eat irregularly. I study nothing. I go to sleep at odd times. Sometimes I walk for the whole night, sometimes I sleep at 10 a.m.
Stalin must have lived the same way: he never lost the nocturnal hours of Siberia.
In this eight-hut universe, the entire population must have been aware of this schism. “We just couldn’t harmonize our characters,” regretted Sverdlov. But there was probably another big but unspeakable reason for their fallout: a girl.{221}
No sooner had Stalin and Sverdlov settled with the Taraseevs than the Georgian must have noticed the youngest girl among the Pereprygin orphans. There were five brothers and two sisters, Natalia and Lidia. We know no details of how this developed. But some time in early 1914 Stalin, now thirty-four, embarked on an affair with Lidia, aged thirteen.
We catch a glimpse of Stalin and Lidia together staggering from drinking-bout to drinking-bout because we have her memoirs of their boozy carousals: “In his spare time, Stalin liked to go to evening dances—he could be very jolly too. He loved to sing and dance. He especially liked the song ‘I’m guarding the gold, the gold… I’m burying the gold, burying the gold, Guess where, pure damsel with your golden hair’… He often joined birthday dinners.” The memoirs of Stalin’s thirteen-year-old mistress were recorded twenty years later at the height of his dictatorship while she remained a Siberian housewife. The official who recorded her reminiscences would not have dared record the seduction, but the memoirs are still tactless. “He often liked to drop in on some people,” says Lidia, meaning herself. “And he also drank.” Was this how he seduced her—or she him? Girls in places like Kureika matured early —and Lidia does not sound like a shrinking violet.
Sverdlov may have disapproved of Stalin’s seduction of the thirteen-year-old, the latest in a line of adolescent girls romanced by the thirty-something Georgian. And Stalin may well have thrown him out in order to enjoy more privacy with his little mistress. But this was far from the end of the scandal.
The two Bolsheviks, now ignoring each other, were carefully watched by their own Gendarme inspectors, Laletin and Popov, whose sole job was to ensure that they did not escape. In cases of such close proximity, the policemen either became the companions, if not personal servants, of the exiles—or their mortal foes. The red- bearded, red-tempered Ivan Laletin soon became Stalin’s enemy.
Once Stalin was going out hunting with his rifle when he was challenged by the Gendarme. He was allowed to handle hunting-rifles with permission, but he refused to surrender his gun to the policeman. In the ensuing fracas, “Gendarme Laletin swooped on Josef Vissarionovich and tried to disarm him.” A fight started. The Gendarme “drew his sabre and managed to cut Stalin on the hand.” Stalin reported Laletin to Captain Kibirov.
By early summer, no matter how furtive the creeping around the eight huts, almost everyone must have known about Stalin’s little mistress. The sabrerattling Gendarme surely saw his chance to nail the insolent Georgian.
“One day,” recalls Fyodor Taraseev, the only villager who dared record the story, “Stalin was staying at home, working, and not leaving the house. The Gendarme found this suspicious and decided to check up on him. Without knocking on the door, he burst into the room.”
Taraseev prudently claims that Stalin was just “working,” yet the inspector found this oddly “suspicious.” And Stalin was furious at being interrupted. The memoirs unanimously emphasize his calmness during searches: so was there something unusual about this one? After all, the policeman deliberately surprised him “without knocking.”
