the Empress Alexandra started to lose control of Petrograd. On the 23rd, crowds rioted in the capital as Stalin settled into one of Achinsk’s cottages. “He had no stuff,” recalls his landlady’s daughter, “just wearing a black overcoat, grey Astrakhan hat. He left the house after lunch and returned late at night.” But he was often visited by “a swarthy woman with a Greek nose and yellow jacket and they spent much time together—he used to see her to the door, closing the doors himself.” The woman was Vera Shveitzer, from whom he was inseparable during these ten days: “She was staying with him.” The memoirs imply that they were living together, but we do not know if they were anything other than roommates—though Shveitzer always greeted him with kisses on the lips: “Oh Koba! Oh Koba!”
On Sunday, 26 February, fifty people were killed in fighting between Petrograd crowds and Cossacks. Bloodshed emboldened the throng, and soldiers began to desert the Tsar. The next day, crowds stormed the Arsenal, seizing 150,000 guns, burning down police headquarters and lynching policemen. One was tossed from a fourth-storey window, before the mob, using sticks and rifle-butts, smashed him into a bloody pulp.
Achinsk was oblivious. Kamenev and his wife, Olga, who was Trotsky’s sister, held a salon. “I used to spend the evenings at the Kamenevs’,” reminisces Anatoly Baikalov, exiled son of a goldmining tycoon. “Djugashvili, or Osip as we called him, was a frequent guest at their home.” Kamenev, a “brilliant speaker and accomplished conversationalist,” overshadowed the “dull and dry Stalin, devoid of colour or witticisms.” When he did say something, “Kamenev dismissed it with brief, almost contemptuous remarks.” The “taciturn and morose” Stalin just puffed on his pipe while its “poisonous smoke irritated Kamenev’s pretty but vain and capricious wife,” who “coughed and implored Stalin to stop. But he never paid any attention to her.”
In Petrograd, the Tsar no longer reigned. On 1 March, in the Taurida Palace, a Provisional Government was formed under a new Premier, Prince Georgi Lvov. In the same building, a Soviet of Workers and Soldiers elected an Executive Committee, chaired by the Georgian Menshevik Karlo Chkheidze. These two parallel institutions took power. The Emperor, isolated, ill-informed, depressed, belatedly tried to return to the capital. But as the imperial train was stranded at Pskov, he haemorrhaged the support of his generals.
On 2 March, Nicholas II, declaring that “he was firmly convinced he had been born for unhappiness and that he had brought unhappiness to Russia,” abdicated in favour not of his haemophiliac son, Alexei, but of his brother Grand Duke Michael, who succeeded as Michael II. But only technically.
The new Justice Minister, Alexander Kerensky, telegraphed Achinsk to order the release of the exiled Duma deputies: “All is in the hands of the people. Prisons are empty, ministers arrested, Empress guarded by our people.” By that night, Achinsk knew that the Revolution had come at last—“but everyone spoke in whispers.”
“The day we received the telegram, it was market-day and I decided that the local peasants shouldn’t leave the market unawares… so I ran to tell them… there was no Tsar any more,” recalls a Bolshevik librarian named Alexandra Pomerantseva, who shared Stalin’s house. “On my way, I met Comrade Stalin” who “looked at my excited face.”
“Where are you running?” he asked.
“I’m running to the market to tell peasants about the Revolution.”
Stalin “approved of this”—and she headed for the marketplace.
On 3 March, Michael II abdicated when the government could not guarantee his safety. On the fourteenth, the Achinsk mayor opened a town meeting at which Kamenev proposed to send a telegram acclaiming Grand Duke Michael for his civic decency. Kamenev would live to regret his un-Bolshevik instinct for thanking Romanovs. “The next morning,” Stalin, who was away in Krasnoyarsk that day, recalled in the 1920s, “I got to hear about it from Comrade Kamenev himself who came to tell me that he had done a foolish thing.” Kamenev denied signing it and accused Stalin of lying.
Stalin telegraphed the Alliluyevs in Petrograd: he was on his way. He spent his last evening in Achinsk with Shveitzer. On 7 March, carriages took Kamenev, Shveitzer and Stalin to the station, whence they jubilantly departed. The trip took four days. At every station, the homecoming Bolsheviks competed with excited local orators to address crowds. Kamenev gave speeches; Stalin watched. He laughed at these speakers, later mimicking their overenthusiastic naivety: “Holy revolution, long-awaited, dear revolution has finally arrived!”
On the morning of 12 March 1917, Stalin, wearing the suit he had worn for that party in July 1913, and
* Some of Stalin’s Kureika fishing friends kept in contact: V. G. Solomin wrote to ask for help, reminiscing about a giant sturgeon he caught for Stalin and Sverdlov. “Comrade Solomin,” answered Stalin on 5 March 1947, “I send you 6,000 roubles from my [Supreme Soviet] deputy’s salary. This sum is not so big, but it’ll be useful. J Stalin.” Molotov recalled how Stalin continued into old age to eat frozen nuggets of fish just as he had in Turukhansk. In 1934, a Stalin museum was founded in Stalin’s love nest, the Pereprygin
PART FIVE
To Raphael Eristavi
