Young Stalin

It sounds very much as if the policeman caught Stalin and Lidia in flagrante delicto.

Stalin attacked him. The policeman again drew his sabre. In the ensuing fight, Stalin was wounded in the neck by the sabre, which so inflamed his anger that “he kicked out the rogue!”

“We witnessed this scene,” says Taraseev. “The Gendarme was running away towards the Yenisei river, cravenly waving his sabre in front of him while Comrade Stalin was pursuing him in a state of high excitement and fury, with his fists clenched.”

If it was a secret, it was out. Even though local lore discouraged affairs with exiles, the local girls were bound to be attracted to these worldly, educated revolutionaries in their midst. This statutory rape was not rape by force but an old-fashioned seduction because, according to the later investigation by KGB Chairman Ivan Serov, “J. V. Stalin started living together with her.” Presumably she was sharing his room, which is how the policeman had caught them together. In his report to Nikita Khrushchev and the Politburo in 1956, which remained secret until the twenty-first century, General Serov implied that the living together was almost as shocking as the seduction.[147]

Stalin moved into the Pereprygin izba. There were two rooms and a shed for cattle in winter. The seven siblings were crammed into one fuggy, cow-dungy room; Stalin rented the filthy second chamber that could only be reached through the cowshed and family room. It contained just a “table covered in newspapers, wooden trestle bed, and tangle of fishing and hunting nets, tackle and hooks, all made by Stalin himself.” Everything was covered in soot from the black tin chimney in the middle of the room.

The glass in the windows was broken, so Stalin sealed the cracks with old newspapers or boarded them up. The only light in this Arctic twilight, where night often lasted throughout the day, was a lamp, but he often lacked kerosene. The lavatory was an outhouse. The Pereprygins were dirt poor, “one day eating shchi [cabbage broth], the next day the holy spirit [nothing], but they owned one cow.”

At night, Lidia would creep into his room, recounts Stalin’s first biographer, Essad Bey, who must have talked to fellow exiles. Certainly she was not shy about recalling what underwear he favoured—“He wore white underwear and a sailor-striped vest,” she confided to her interviewer in 1952 when Stalin was almost worshipped as a demi- god.

The brothers were not happy about the seduction. There are hints of their disapproval: Stalin got his food and bread from his old landlady, not from the Pereprygins, though Lidia claimed that “this was because the girls were too young to cook.” Yet as orphans the girls had cooked for their brothers from an early age. More likely, Soso and his moll were banned from family meals.

The affair might have remained tolerable, but there was worse to come: Lidia fell pregnant with Stalin’s child. The Pereprygin brothers were angry, even though the exact law of consent was hardly enforced in distant communities in the Arctic Circle, where girls married and had children in their early teens. According to General Serov, Gendarme Laletin, despite having fled from the irate Stalin, threatened “to instigate criminal proceedings for living together with an underage girl. J. V. Stalin promised the Gendarme to marry Pereprygina when she came of age.” So, once again, Stalin became engaged—and the family, whether gratefully or begrudgingly, accepted the relationship.[148] In return, Stalin “shared his fish with them” as one of the family. Indeed he treated Lidia almost as his young wife. When his friend the elderly Elizaveta Taraseeva visited, Stalin commanded: “Lidia, Lidia, babushka’s come to tea! Feed her well.”

The policeman’s interference was the final straw. Stalin complained to Captain Kibirov, who favoured his fellow Caucasian. Stalin had a village of witnesses to the hapless Gendarme drawing his sword on an exile and the ignominious chase along the riverbank. Yet it took considerable chutzpah for Stalin to complain about the policeman when he had impregnated an underaged girl. As so often with Stalin’s self-righteous indignation, it worked.

That summer of 1914, around June, Kibirov agreed to replace Laletin, telling his deputy, “All right, let’s send Merzliakov to Kureika. Since Djugashvili is so keen to replace his inspector, let’s get him out of harm’s way.” In a reversal of roles, Gendarme Laletin was afraid of his prisoner—and with good reason. His replacement, Mikhail Merzliakov, now arrived. Stalin immediately assumed the role of quasi-aristocratic master, while the Gendarme became a cross between valet, batman and bodyguard for the rest of his sentence.

Stalin kept studying the nationalities issue, and English and German. “Dear friend,” a rather more cheerful Stalin wrote to Zinoviev on 20 May, “my warmest greetings to you… I’m waiting for the books… I also ask you to send me some English journals (an old or new issue doesn’t matter—it’s for reading since there’s nothing in English here and I’m afraid I’m losing all my acquired English skills without any practice…”

Soso’s engagement to Lidia, indeed the relationship itself, was a transitory amusement to be abandoned by the wayside of his revolutionary mission. The pregnancy was presumably an irritant. Yet the locals claim that Lidia was in love with Stalin. It was not her last pregnancy by him.^{222}

In late summer, Sverdlov left Kureika and moved to Selivanikha, while Suren Spandarian, Stalin’s best friend, arrived in nearby Monastyrskoe.

In late August 1914, Stalin took the boat downriver for a reunion with Spandarian—just as the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo, a shot that sent Russia and the Great Powers lurching into the Great War. “The bourgeois vampires of the belligerent countries plunged the world into a bloody shambles,” wrote Stalin. “Wholesale slaughter, ruin, starvation and… savagery—so that a handful of crowned and uncrowned robbers may pillage foreign lands and rake in untold millions.”

As the lights went out all over Europe, Stalin found himself irrelevant, forgotten, frustrated and engaged against his will to a pregnant adolescent peasant-girl, at the centre of nothing—except an Arctic sex scandal. Nineteen-fourteen was not his finest hour. As the Great Powers fought, the snows obscured the sun and the news from the outside world. Stalin disappeared into the Siberian winter.^{223}

35. The Hunter

Now the only exile in ice-bound, twilighted Kureika, Stalin started to live closely with aboriginal Tunguses and Ostyaks. There was little to do, but survival was a struggle: tundra wolves howled at the edge of the village. When Stalin visited the outhouse lavatory, he fired a rifle to keep the wolves at bay. When he travelled, the sleigh “dashed along under the interminable howls of wolves.” The wolf-packs of Kureika entered Stalin’s consciousness, the enemies always circling his Siberian hut. He sketched them on documents during meetings, especially towards the end of his life as he orchestrated a last Terror campaign, the Doctors’ Plot. In his last exile, he told visitors, “The peasants used to shoot mad wolves.”

Yet somehow it suited Stalin: he began to enjoy Kureika. Strangely, it became one of the happiest times in his morose life. His favourite companions were a little dog called Stepan Timofeevich, or Tishka for short, which the locals gave him as a present, a Tungus fisherman named Martin Peterin, and his police inspector, Merzliakov. Lidia’s pregnancy was increasingly visible. Siberia became more bearable because Stalin now began to receive regular money orders: during 1915–16, he received ten, worth more than one hundred roubles in all, so he could buy food and clothes and pay bribes where necessary.[149]

He became the solitary hunter, a role that suited his self-image as a man on a sacred mission, riding out into the snows with a rifle for company, but no attachments except his faith, lacking all bourgeois sentimentality but always displaying Arctic stoicism even when beset by tragedy. For the rest of his life, he regaled Alliluyevs or Politburo grandees with tales of his Siberian adventures. Even when he ruled Russia he was still that solitary hunter.

“Osip” or “Pockmarked Oska,” as they called him, venturing out alone in a head-to-foot reindeer-fur outfit, became a skilled hunter and close companion of the tribesmen. Laletin did not permit him to own a rifle, so, one local remembers, “We took the rifle to the woods and left it on a pre-agreed tree so he’d find it.” He shot Arctic foxes, partridges and ducks on long expeditions.

The villagers began to respect Pockmarked Oska, with his pipe and books. “The locals liked him,” says Merzliakov. “They visited him and sat all night with him. He visited them too and attended their merry parties.” They brought him fish and venison, which he purchased. He appreciated their laconic tranquillity and was amused