by their respect for shamans and by their persistent belief, despite nominal Orthodoxy, in the masters and spirits who inhabited the spaces of Siberia. Above all, he studied and copied their fishing and hunting techniques.
Fish and reindeer were their staples. The reindeer, who are able to live on blankets of lichen, were treated with sacred respect by the tribesmen, providing transport (pulling sleighs), clothing (furs), investment (the wealthiest chiefs owned herds of 10,000) and food (boiled reindeer meat), all in one. Peterin, probably an Ostyak creole, taught his friend the art of Yenisei fishing. Stalin made his own fishing-line and dug his own personal ice- hole, remembers Merzliakov, whose memoir, recorded in 1936, is the best account of his life in Kureika. According to Stalin’s own somewhat Gothic account, he learned to fish with such dexterity at his ice-hole that the Ostyak whispered awestruck: “Thou ist possessed by the Word.” Stalin enjoyed the fish diet: “There were lots of fish, but salt was as precious as gold, so they just threw the fish into their outhouse where in the—20° freeze they piled up like frozen pieces of wood. Then we’d break flakes off and let them melt in our mouths.” He started to catch huge sturgeons.
“Once,” he recounted, “a tempest caught me on the river. It seemed I was done for, but I made it to the bank.” Another time, he was coming home with Ostyak friends with a good catch of sturgeon and sea-salmon when he got separated from the others. A
“Of course it’s me and I’m not a wood-spirit!” he retorted, before falling into a deep sleep for eighteen hours.
He was not imagining that he was in danger—the tribesmen were accustomed to losing men on their fishing expeditions. “I remember in spring at high water, thirty men went out fishing and in the evening when we came back, one was missing,” Stalin recounted. They casually explained that their companion had “remained out there.” Stalin was puzzled until one said that “He drowned.” Their nonchalance perplexed Stalin, but they explained: “Why should we have pity for men? We can always make more of them, but a horse, try to make a horse!” Stalin used this in a 1935 speech to illustrate the value of human life, but actually it must have been another experience that taught him its cheapness.
“I went on a hunt one winter,” Stalin told his magnates Khrushchev and Beria at one of his dinners after the Second World War, “took my gun, and crossed the Yenisei on skis for about 12 versts and saw some partridges on a tree. I had twelve rounds and there were twenty-four partridges. I killed twelve and the rest just sat there, so I thought I’d go back for twelve more rounds. When I came back they were still sitting there.”
“Still sitting there?” prompted Khrushchev. Beria urged Stalin to continue.
“That’s right,” boasted Stalin, “so I killed the remaining twelve, tied them to my belt and dragged them home with me.” By the time he told this to his son-in-law Yuri Zhdanov, he boasted he had shot
Stalin amassed a little medicine cabinet and became the closest thing Kureika had to a doctor: “J. V. helped people with medicine, dressed wounds with iodine and gave drugs.” He “taught the tribesmen to wash,” says Merzliakov, “and I remember how he washed one of them with soap.” He suffered from rheumatism, which he eased in the bathhouse, but the pain remained into old age, when he used to perch on the Kremlin’s heaters during long meetings. He was good at playing with the Tungus children, singing and romping with them, sometimes telling them about his own unhappy childhood. Little Dasha Taraseeva “used to ride on his back, pulling his thick dark hair and crying, ‘Neigh like a horse, uncle!’” When Fyodor Taraseev’s cow sickened with colic, Stalin impressed him with the skills he had learned as a boy in Georgia: he “slaughtered the cow and carved the meat like a real master.”
Stalin still enjoyed partying. “At the Taraseevs’ place, the young gathered in a circle for a party—Stalin danced in the middle beating time, then he started singing,” recalls a visitor to Kureika, Daria Ponamareva, “‘I’m burying the gold, burying the gold,’” always that favourite song. “He was expert in dancing,” says Anfisa Taraseeva, “and taught the young.”
Sometimes, the Georgian from the lush mountainous Caucasus peered out at the
He also spent much time alone, writing at night. “My dog Tishka was my companion,” Stalin reminisced. “In winter nights, if I had kerosene and could read and write, he’d come in, press close to my legs and whimper as if he was talking to me. I leaned down patting his head, saying, ‘Are you frozen, Tishka? Warm yourself up!’” He joked that he “liked to discuss international politics with the dog, Stepan Timofeevich,” clearly the world’s first canine pundit. For Stalin, pets had advantages over people: they provided selfless affection and passionate admiration yet never betrayed their masters (nor became pregnant by them), and yet they could be abandoned without guilt.
The inactivity, isolation from the political game and lack of reading materials sometimes depressed him bitterly, especially when he brooded about Lenin and Zinoviev. Had they forgotten him? Where was his latest article? And why had he not been paid? In the winter of 1915, he sarcastically asked them: “How am I? What am I doing? I’m not all right. I’m doing almost nothing. And what can I do with a complete lack of serious books?… In all my exiles, I’ve never had such a miserable life as here.”
Even this fanatical Marxist, convinced that the progress of history would bring about revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat, must have sometimes doubted if he would ever return. Even Lenin doubted the Revolution, asking Krupskaya, “Will we ever live to see it?” Yet Stalin never seems to have lost faith. “The Russian Revolution is as inevitable as the rising of the sun,” he had written back in 1905 and he had not changed his view. “Can you prevent the sun from rising?”
When he could get his hands on newspapers, the future Supreme Commander-in-Chief eagerly discussed “the ulcers of war” with Merzliakov. During the Second World War, he sometimes quoted examples from the battles of the First that he had followed in Kureika.[151] As the Tsar tottered from one bungled defeat to another, Stalin must have anticipated that this war would, like that of 1904, finally bring Revolution. Perhaps he was not just misleading the Okhrana when he told Petrovsky in Petersburg: “Someone spread a rumour that I wouldn’t be staying for my whole sentence. What nonsense! I swear and I’ll be damned if I don’t keep my word, that this won’t happen. I’ll remain in exile until my sentence ends [in 1917]. At times I’ve considered escaping but now I’ve finally rejected the idea.” One senses his weariness: if Lenin and Zinoviev would not help him, then he would not help them.
Somewhere around December 1914, Lidia gave birth to a baby.{224}
36. The Robinson Crusoe of Siberia
The child died soon afterwards. Stalin made no comment about this, but he was definitely in Kureika at the time and the whole settlement must have been aware of it. Whether or not Lidia’s brothers forgave their libidinous tenant, the relationship with Lidia continued.
Stalin’s new policeman, Merzliakov, made his life much more pleasant. He did not spy on his charge, follow him or search him, and he allowed him to meet friends, go on long hunting expeditions and even disappear for weeks on end. “In the summer we went by boat… pulled by dogs and on return we rowed back. In winter we went on horseback,” and the fur-clad, pipe-puffing Stalin would despatch the half-policeman, half-valet Merzliakov to collect his mail. Almost twenty years later, Stalin was still grateful to Merzliakov—and probably saved his life.[152]
In February 1915, “during the months when it was always dark with no distinction between day and night,” he was visited by Spandarian and his mistress Vera Shveitzer. They had driven 125 miles up the frozen Yenisei on
