Young Stalin

Meteorological Observatory, where Stalin had lived and worked after leaving the seminary. It was Stalin’s last job before he plunged into the conspiratorial underground, indeed his last real employment before he joined Lenin’s Soviet government in October 1917. Later the director of this weather-centre admitted he had never known what riches lay under his head.

Stalin himself, many sources claim, helped stow the cash in the observatory. If this sounds like a myth, it is plausible: it transpires that he often handled stolen funds, riding shotgun across the mountains with saddlebags full of cash from bank robberies and piracy.

Surprisingly, that night Stalin felt safe enough to go home to Kato and boast of his exploit to his family—his boys had done it.^{18} Well might he boast. The money was safe in the weatherman’s mattress and would soon be on its way to Lenin. No one suspected Stalin or even Kamo. The booty would be smuggled abroad, some of it even laundered through the Credit Lyonnais. The police of a dozen nations would pursue cash and gangsters for months, in vain.

For a couple of days after the heist, Stalin, it is said, unsuspected of any connection to the robbery, was secure enough to drink insouciantly in riverside taverns, but not for long. He suddenly told his wife that they were leaving at once to start a new life in Baku, the oil-boom city on the other side of the Caucasus.

“The devil knows,” reflected Novoye Vremya (the Tiflis New Times) , “how this uniquely audacious robbery was carried out.” Stalin had pulled off the perfect crime.

The Tiflis bank robbery turned out to be far from perfect. Indeed it became a poisoned chalice. Afterwards, Stalin never lived in Tiflis or Georgia again. The fate of Kamo would be insanely bizarre. The quest for the cash— some of which, it turned out, was in marked notes—would be tangled, but even these astonishing twists were far from the end of the matter for Stalin. The heist’s success was almost a disaster for him. The robbery’s global notoriety became a powerful weapon against Lenin, and against Stalin personally.

The gangsters fell out over the spoils. Lenin and his comrades fought for possession of the cash like rats in a cage. His enemies spent the next three years launching three separate Party investigations hoping to ruin him. Stalin, persona non grata in Georgia, tainted by the brazen flouting of Party rules and this reckless carnage, was expelled from the Party by the Tiflis Committee. This was a blot that could have derailed his bid to succeed Lenin and spoiled his ambition to become a Russian statesman and a supreme pontiff of Marxism. It was so sensitive that even in 1918 Stalin launched an extraordinary libel case to suppress the story.[5] His career as gangster godfather, audacious bank robber, killer, pirate and arsonist, though whispered at home and much enjoyed by critics abroad, remained hidden until the twenty-first century.

In another sense, the Tiflis spectacular was the making of him. Stalin had now proved himself, not only as a gifted politician but also as a ruthless man of action, to the one patron who really counted. Lenin decided that Stalin was “exactly the kind of person I need.”

Stalin, his wife and baby vanished from Tiflis two days later—but it was far from his last heist. There were new worlds to conquer—Baku, the greatest oil city in the world, St. Petersburg the capital, and vast Russia herself. Indeed Stalin, the Georgian child raised rough on the violent, clannish streets of a turbulent town that was the bank-robbery capital of the Empire, now stepped, for the first time, onto the Russian stage. He never looked back.

Yet he was on the eve of a personal tragedy which helped transform this murderous egomaniac into the supreme politician for whom no prize, no challenge and no cost in human life would be too great to realize his personal ambitions and his utopian dreams.^{19}

PART ONE

Morning

The rose’s bud had blossomed out
Reaching out to touch the violet
The lily was waking up
And bending its head in the breeze
High in the clouds the lark
Was singing a chirruping hymn
While the joyful nightingale
With a gentle voice was saying—
“Be full of blossom, oh lovely land
Rejoice Iverians’ country
And you oh Georgian, by studying
Bring joy to your motherland.”

—SOSELO (Josef Stalin)

1. Keke’s Miracle: Soso

On 17 May 1872, a handsome young cobbler, the very model of a chivalrous Georgian man, Vissarion “Beso” Djugashvili, aged twenty-two, married Ekaterina “Keke” Geladze, seventeen, an attractive freckled girl with auburn hair, at the Uspensky Church in the small Georgian town of Gori.^{20}

A matchmaker had visited Keke’s house to tell her about the suit of Beso the cobbler: he was a respected artisan in Baramov’s small workshop, quite a catch. “Beso,” says Keke in newly discovered memoirs,[6] “was considered a very popular young man among my friends and they were all dreaming of marrying him. My friends nearly burst with jealousy. Beso was an enviable groom, a true karachogheli [Georgian knight], with beautiful moustaches, very well dressed—and with the special sophistication of a town-dweller.” Nor was Keke in any doubt that she herself was something of a catch too: “Among my female friends, I became the desired and beautiful girl.” Indeed, “slender, chestnut-haired with big eyes,” she was said to be “very pretty.”

The wedding, according to tradition, took place just after sunset; Georgian social life, writes one historian, was “as ritualised as English Victorian behaviour.” The marriage was celebrated with the rambunctious festivity of the wild town of Gori. “It was,” Keke remembers, “hugely glamorous.” The male guests were true karachogheli, “cheerful, daring and generous,” wearing their splendid black chokhas, “broad-shouldered with slim waists.” The chief of Beso’s two best men was Yakov “Koba” Egnatashvili, a strapping wrestler, wealthy merchant and local hero who, as Keke puts it, “always tried to assist us in the creation of our family.”

The groom and his friends gathered for toasts at his home, before parading through the streets to collect Keke and her family. The garlanded couple then rode to church together in a colourfully decorated wedding phaeton, bells tingling, ribbons fluttering. In the church, the choir gathered in the gallery; below them, men and women stood separately among the flickering candles. The singers burst into their elevating and harmonic Georgian melodies accompanied by a zurna, a Georgian wind instrument like a Berber pipe.

The bride entered with her bridesmaids, who were careful not to tread on the train, a special augur of bad