sledges, propelled by dog-power, harrassed by wolves. At last they had seen the tiny settlement from afar and Soso’s snow-covered
“We stayed at Josef Vissarionovich’s place for two days.” Vera noticed that Soso, suffering from arthritis, was “wearing a jacket but he had only one ofhis arms through the sleeve. Later I realized he likes to dress in such a way so as to keep his right arm free.” Stalin, who was delighted to see them, went out to the river and proudly returned with an enormous three-pud sturgeon over his shoulder: “There are no small fish in my ice-hole.”
Spandarian and Shveitzer came to discuss the trial in Petersburg of the five Bolshevik Duma deputies and
Stalin and Spandarian were disgusted by Kamenev’s behaviour. “That man’s not trustworthy,” declared Stalin, “he could betray the Revolution,” whereupon, wrapped in tarpaulins, dressed head to foot in reindeer furs and guided by Tungus tribesmen, Spandarian and Vera took Stalin back with them to Monastyrskoe, the Northern Lights gorgeously illuminating the tundra. “Suddenly Stalin started singing,” writes Shveitzer. “Suren joined in and it was so lovely to hear well-known melodies carrying me away” as the sleigh rushed for two days across the ice in that endless twilight.
Spandarian and Stalin wrote to Lenin. Stalin, the Bolshevik hunter, no longer whining about owed money and unsent books, struck the very pose of militant virility that would be the Bolshevik style in power:
My greetings to you, dear Vladimir Illich, the very warmest greetings. Greetings to Zinoviev, greetings to Nadezhda! How are things, how is your health? I live as before, I munch my bread and am getting through half my sentence. Boring—but what can you do? And how are things with you? You must be having a jollier time… I’ve read a little article by Plekhanov in Rech—what an incorrigible blabbing old woman! Eh!… And the Liquidators with their [Duma] deputy-agents…? There’s no one to give them a beating, the devil knows! Surely they won’t remain unpunished? Cheer us up and inform us there’ll soon be an organ to give them a right good punching straight in their gobs!
Lenin remembered his “fiery Colchian” in exile. “Koba is well,” he informed his comrades; then a few months later, he asked: “Big request—find out last name of Koba (Josef Dj—? Have forgotten). It’s important.”
When Stalin’s exeat was over, he returned to Kureika for the rest of the long winter. The ice thawed on the Yenisei. In May 1915, the steamboats brought interesting companions upriver from Krasnoyarsk. Kamenev arrived in Monastyrskoe with the Duma deputies. Sverdlov and Spandarian were nearby. During July 1915, Stalin was summoned to a meeting at the house shared by Kamenev and Petrovsky in Monastyrskoe.
The Bolsheviks enjoyed an idyllic summer reunion. They even took group photographs.[153] But for the Bolsheviks even the picnics were political, involving denunciations and trials. Stalin and Spandarian supported Lenin and decided to put Kamenev on trial in Monastyrskoe.
Kamenev gave Stalin
At Kamenev’s “trial,” Stalin had the casting vote. Slippery as ever and always building new alliances, he attacked Kamenev and then departed for Kureika before the final vote, thus saving the victim. Kamenev patronized the cruder Georgian, while Stalin found him congenial but disdained him as a man and politician: “I saw Gradov [Kamenev] and company in the summer,” he wrote to Zinoviev. “They all rather resemble wet hens. So these are our ‘hawks’ are they!”
Stalin returned to another long winter in Kureika. In early November, after the snows had descended, he got permission to see the doctor in Monastyrskoe. Arriving in full furs on a four-dog sleigh, he burst into Spandarian’s house and kissed his friend on the cheeks—and Vera twice on the lips.
“Oh Koba!” she exclaimed, delighted to see him. “Oh Koba!”
Spandarian, consumptive and suffering from nervous tension, was “sometimes so frantic that a gnat bite would drive him to tear his clothes to shreds. Suren was depressed,” but “Stalin was very cheerful,” recalls a fellow exile, Boris Ivanov, “and his arrival always reinvigorated him.”
Stalin collected a letter from Zinoviev, to which he replied sarcastically:
Dear friend!
I’ve finally got your letter. I thought you’d completely forgotten me, a slave of God, and yet it turned out you did not… And what can I do with a complete lack of serious books?… I have lots of questions and subjects in my mind but no source-materials. I’m dying to write but I have nothing to study… You ask about my finances. And why do you ask about that? You probably have some money—aren’t you thinking of sharing it with me? Go on then! I swear it’ll come just in time!
On arrival, Stalin helped embitter a local feud, the sort that he always relished, both as mean-spirited sport and political stimulant. The Bolshevik exiles in Monastyrskoe, led by Spandarian, had found themselves so short of sugar and furs that winter that they robbed the local Revelion trading shop of its precious goodies. When the police investigated, an exile named Petukhov sneaked on the thieves. Isolated and paranoid in their Siberian time warp, exiles took sides with either the robbers or the informer. Spandarian wanted to punish Petukhov and try him at another Party trial. Sverdlov backed Petukhov and wanted to try Spandarian for the robbery itself. But Sverdlov himself had become too close to the local police, giving officers German lessons. Spandarian and his allies accused Sverdlov of being a “morally tainted” Okhrana spy.
Sverdlov boycotted the Party trial at which Spandarian, Vera and five others voted to condemn Petukhov. Stalin, who had himself faced expulsion at similar sittings, grandly sat on the fence, abstaining from the vote for Petukhov’s expulsion, explaining that “they should expel both Petukhov and Sverdlov.” The row became so heated that some of Sverdlov’s group were beaten up.
“Exile is the worst,” wrote Sverdlov, “there’s no trace of community or comradeship: isolation and distance are infernal and murderous.” Now Spandarian “fell seriously ill… starting to cough blood.”{225}
“We spent a long time in the village,” says Stalin’s police-batman, Merzliakov. “I had no idea who he was seeing. J. V. [Stalin] eventually returned to the police station himself to say that we could go back.”
In Kureika again, Stalin survived the winter of 1915–16 in his sooty room chez Pereprygin, continuing his sexual relationship with Lidia. He was delighted to receive a parcel from Olga Alliluyeva in Petersburg that inspired a rare sentimentality:
I’m so grateful to you, deeply respected Olga, for your good and pure feeling towards me! I shall never forget your caring attitude to me. I look forward to the moment when I’m freed from exile and can come to Petersburg and personally thank you and Sergei for everything. I’ve only got two years left. I got the parcel. Thanks. I only ask one thing—don’t waste any more money on me; you yourselves need the money but—do send me postcards of scenes of nature….
Anna and Nadya Alliluyeva, the latter now fourteen, also sent their exiled hero a new suit, and hid a little note to him in the pocket.
In March 1916, when it was possible to use the sledge on the Yenisei, Stalin headed back to see Spandarian in Monastyrskoe “to send his letters,” recalls Vera. “By the way,” he complained to a comrade on 25 February, “tell me please what is going on with an article by K. Stalin ‘On Cultural-National Autonomy’—was it published or
