somehow lost? I’ve been trying to find out for more than a year and have found out nothing… What am I doing? Certainly I’m not wasting my time! Yours Josef.” The article had been sent to Lenin via Alliluyev—but somewhere it was lost forever.
Stalin found Spandarian seriously ill with TB and heart failure: the Armenian petitioned to be moved from Turukhansk. Worried about Spandarian, Stalin also petitioned the authorities. After a few days, he sledged back to Kureika. “That,” says Vera Shveitzer, “was the last time he met Suren Spandarian.”[155]
During the summer, the Georgian lodger impregnated Lidia for the second time—and then typically made himself scarce. Local exiles, wrote one of them, Ivanov, “got to know that [Stalin] had disappeared from Kureika— he escaped,” for some months. Where was he? Merzliakov was not quite sure himself. He allowed “JV” to fish alone downstream on Polovinka Island in the Yenisei River “for the whole summer… I just followed the rumours that he hadn’t escaped yet.” The policeman did wonder what Stalin could be doing on this remote island. “It’s an empty (uninhabited) place, this Polovinka. Just sand. Where was he fishing? There was nobody else there.” But it turns out Stalin did spend time on the “empty Polovinka.”
Only a few local hunters stayed on this remote island, which was rich in game. Stepanida Dubikova reveals that “Osip” spent much of the summer there. “We helped him build a small hut for just one person out of birch branches.” Stepanida and her family, who built their own birch hut, were the only others on Polovinka. “Osip used to visit our hut and I’d cook him his favourite, grilled sterlet.” Stalin spent weeks totally alone in this one-man hut, fishing for himself, content in the extreme solitude. But sometimes he was not on his island either.
“Stalin arrived to see us,” reports Badaev, the Duma deputy, in Yeniseisk, “and we met there… Despite the secrecy of his visit, all the exiles got to hear Comrade Stalin was here and dropped in to see us.” He must have visited Kostino too, because on his way back he called in at Miroedikha, where he partied with a Georgian exile, Nestor Rukhadze, who “played the accordion and balalaika.” Stalin, in “long coat, hat with earflaps and red galoshes,” joined the local youths who “spent the evenings talking, singing and dancing.”
Merzliakov had not kept his Captain Kibirov informed of Stalin’s summer disappearance. The news spread, but Kibirov, whether bribed or charmed, the latest in a line of policemen to be suborned by Stalin, did nothing until his superiors heard that the Georgian exile had vanished, whereupon he arrested Fyodor Taraseev. Taraseev got one and a half years in prison for aiding an escape by lending his boat. Stalin was not punished.[156]
What was Stalin doing in the summer of 1916? Most likely, his need to get out of Kureika was connected with Lidia’s second pregnancy, hence Merzliakov’s suspicious but tactful vagueness. The Pereprygin brothers may have been cross again: when Stalin returned in early autumn he moved out of the Pereprygins’ into Alexei Taraseev’s house before returning to the Pereprygins’ again where Lidia, now aged fifteen, was heavily pregnant. He seems to have caroused and visited friends on his local tour as far as Yeniseisk and Krasnoyarsk, but locals claim that he was devising a way to avoid marrying his pregnant teenage mistress. {226} By 1916, the rot at the head of the Empire had reached its outlying limbs—the Siberian police were loosening their grip. “We managed to escape all police officers and guards,” said Badaev.
The war was not going well. The Emperor had left Petersburg (renamed Petrograd to sound less Germanic) and taken command of his armies. In Petrograd, his foolish, neurotic and ham-handed Empress, Alexandra, dominated the government. Prompted by Rasputin and a mediocre crew of mountebanks and war-profiteers, she hired and fired her ever more corrupt and inept ministers. No one knew it, but three centuries of Romanov rule had only months to run.
37. Stalin’s Reindeer-Propelled Sleigh and a Siberian Son
In October 1916, Stalin, a fanatical Marxist with a damaged arm, was conscripted with his fellow exiles. He had successfully dodged the draft for over a decade. The call-up of exiles shows the manpower shortage of the Romanov war machine, but both Stalin and local officials must have known that his arm would not pass the medical examination. Turukhansk locals claim that Stalin persuaded Kibirov to put his name on the conscription list with “a false certificate,” a shenanigan he may have arranged on his long summer exeat. Had he volunteered in order to escape his marital obligations and last months of exile in Kureika?
“Police Chief Kibirov,” recalls Vera Shveitzer, “formed the first group of nine exiles to be sent to Krasnoyarsk.” Stalin did not hang around in Kureika. He quickly said goodbye, giving one lady who had looked after him the “present of a signed photograph and two overcoats.” Then, “seen off like a real hero,” he set out with Merzliakov for Monastyrskoe.
After he was gone, in roughly April 1917, Lidia gave birth to a son whom she named Alexander. She did not inform the father for a long time—and Stalin never contacted her. But somehow he heard: he told the Alliluyev sisters that he had fathered a Siberian son during his last exile. He was utterly unfettered by paternal feelings, or even sentimental curiosity.
Stalin abandoned his son, but Turukhansk somehow made him more of a Russian. Perhaps Siberia froze some of the Georgian exoticism out of him. He brought the self-reliance, vigilance, frigidity and solitude of the Siberian hunter with him to the Kremlin. Generalissimo Stalin told the truth when in 1947 he wrote to one of his Kureika fishing pals: “I have not forgotten you and my friends in Turukhansk. Probably I’ll never forget you.” Molotov put it best: “A little piece of Siberia remained lodged in Stalin for the rest of his life.”*
Around 12 December 1916, Kibirov put together the two groups of exiles, twenty in all, for the trip to Krasnoyarsk—“Stalin,” writes Sverdlov, “was among the comrades.” Sverdlov was barred from the glory of almost certain death on some forgotten field of the Eastern Front because he was a Jew, one of the few benefits of Romanov anti-Semitism. The others begged Stalin to make up with Sverdlov and shake hands. Stalin refused.
The conscripts departed in a picturesque parade of bunting-emblazoned sleighs, pulled by reindeer. The exiles, waving mandolins and balalaikas, “were given a Siberian
Stalin, taking command, decided that “we had no reason to hurry. We were exhausted but why should we hurry to be drafted?” records a fellow traveller. “‘There’ll be plenty of time,’ he said, ‘for the Germans to make mincemeat of us.’”
The exiles sometimes had “a party on two or three nights” with Stalin leading the singing. The policemen complained and telegraphed Kibirov, who threatened to “send the Cossacks after us but we telegraphed back: ‘We’re ready for your Cossacks.’ Stalin took part in wording the telegram.” He had managed to turn the trip into an almost two-month reindeer-propelled debauch. Somewhere along the way, the carousing convicts celebrated the New Year: 1917.
Finally, around 9 February, the sleighs arrived in Krasnoyarsk. On their word of honour, the police let the exiles settle for a few days before reporting to the Military Command. Stalin moved into the apartment of Ivan Samoilov, a Bolshevik, then he summoned Vera Shveitzer over from Achinsk. She told him Spandarian was dead.
Stalin reported to the medical examiner, who found him “unfit for military service” because of his arm. This was convenient but embarrassing for a future Supreme Commander-in-Chief who in his own eyes was as much a soldier as a politician. When Anna Alliluyeva revealed he was “unfit” in memoirs published just after the Second World War, Stalin never forgave her.
On 16 February, he applied to the Yeniseisk governor to spend the last four months of his exile in nearby Achinsk, “a large village of 6,000 inhabitants, two churches, and one-storey cottages,” further west along the Trans-Siberian Railway, where Vera Shveitzer and Kamenev were living.
On 21 February, he moved into Vera Shveitzer’s Achinsk apartment—just as, thousands of miles to the west,
