Stalin and Sergo were despatched back to the Taurida Palace to seek a “guarantee that Illich wouldn’t be lynched by the Junkers.” The Mensheviks, Stalin reported back, “replied that they couldn’t say what will happen.”
Stalin and Sergo were now sure that Lenin would be murdered if he surrendered. “Stalin and the others urged Illich not to appear,” says Krupskaya. “Stalin convinced him and… saved his life.” Stalin was right: an ex— Duma member, V. N. Polovtiev, encountered the officer assigned to arrest Lenin. “How should I deliver this gentleman, Lenin?” the officer asked. “Whole or in pieces?”
The debate went back and forth. Suddenly Sergo drew an imaginary dagger and shouted like a Georgian bandit: “I’ll slice up anyone who wants Illich to be arrested!”
That seemed to clinch it. Lenin had to be smuggled out of Petrograd: Stalin “undertook to organize Lenin’s departure.” A worker named Emelianov[168] agreed to hide Lenin in his shack in Razliv, to the north of Petrograd.
Olga and Anna Alliluyeva bustled around their guests, making sure that Lenin and Stalin were eating properly.
“What are you feeding Stalin?” asked Lenin. “Please, Olga, you must watch him, he’s losing weight.”
Stalin meanwhile checked that Lenin was being fed properly: “Well, how’s the situation with provisions? Is Illich eating? Do the best you can for him.” Sometimes Stalin turned up with extra food.
Lenin and Stalin cautiously studied the escape plans. On 11 July, “Stalin arrived before the departure and everyone gathered in Lenin’s room to devise ways of disguising him.” Olga tried bandaging Lenin’s head, but that did not work. No one suggested drag.
“Wouldn’t it be better if I shaved,” suggested Lenin. “A moment later, Lenin sat with his face covered in soap” in front of the round shaving-mirror next to the portrait of Tolstoy in Stalin’s bedroom. Soso personally “acted as barber,” shaving off Lenin’s beard and moustache.
“It’s very good now.” Lenin admired himself in the mirror. “I look just like a Finnish peasant, and there’s hardly anyone who’ll recognize me.”
On the 12th, Stalin and Alliluyev escorted Lenin to Primorsky Station for his disappearing act: he hid at Razliv before moving to a barn in Finland. Travelling back and forth, Stalin became his main contact with Petrograd. “One of my sons used to bring Stalin to the shack [where Lenin was hiding] by boat,” remembered Emelianov.
In a barrage of articles, Stalin denounced Kerensky’s “new Dreyfus Affair,” the “vile calumnies against the Leader of our Party,” and the “pen pirates of the venal press.” He specially mocked the Menshevik “blind fools” for acting as patsies. Kerensky, he wrote, would drown them “like flies in milk.”
Hand over the Bolsheviks? he had the Mensheviks asking Kerensky in a rare example of Stalinist satire. “At your service, Messieurs the Intelligence Service.” Disarm the Revolution? “With the greatest of pleasure, Messieurs Landowners and Capitalists.”
Stalin acted as Bolshevik leader—and moved house: it was to change his life. {239}
“No one’s watching the building,” Olga Alliluyeva reassured him when he dropped in one day. “You’d better live with us, rest and sleep properly.”
Stalin moved out of Molotov’s apartment and into the Alliluyevs’. The rooms were airy, light and comfortable; the kitchen, the bathroom, even the shower, were modern and state of the art; the maid, living in a tiny room, cooked the meals. Stalin took Fyodor’s bedroom (formerly Lenin’s), which boasted a real bed, a round mirror on a wooden shaving-table, an ornate desk and a portrait of Lord Byron. At breakfast next day, he said he had not slept so well for a long time.
Soso was often alone with Olga. Sergei ran his power station; Nadya was on summer holiday in Moscow; Anna worked for the Party. Olga looked after him: she bought him a new suit. He asked her to sew in some thermal pads, two high vertical velvet collars and buttons up to the neck because his sore throat made a collar and tie uncomfortable.[169]
Soso’s life remained chaotic: he would buy his food on the way home—a loaf of bread and some fish or sausage from a street kiosk. He worked tirelessly editing
In late July, he moved out again during the Sixth Congress, covertly held in a monastic building on Sampsonevsky Boulevard, in case of a police crackdown.{240} As acting leader, Stalin gave the main report, exhorting the 300 delegates to concentrate on the future: “We must be prepared for anything.” After delivering another report “on the political situation,” he insisted that Russia create her own revolution and stop believing “that only Europe can show us the way,” a precurser of his famous slogan, “Socialism in One Country.” Stalin’s second report was probably written by Lenin or at least drafted with him, but his real partner in rebuilding the Party was Sverdlov, with whom he was finally reconciled.
“The report of Comrade Stalin has fully illuminated the activity of the CC,” declared Sverdlov. “There remains for me to limit myself to the narrow sphere of the CC’s organizational activity.”
Stalin was chosen chief editor of the Party press and member of the Constituent Assembly, but when the Cental Committee was elected he appeared below Kamenev and Trotsky. The Bolsheviks were still at a low ebb, but Stalin predicted that the Provisional Government’s “peaceful period is over. Times will be turbulent, crisis will follow crisis.”{241}
He returned to the Alliluyevs’. Nadya’s summer holidays were over. She came home, ready for school.
That summer, Stalin lay low with the two sisters in the Alliluyev apartment, where he became the life and soul of the party. “Sometimes Soso did not come for days,” writes Anna Alliluyeva. Then he suddenly arrived in the middle of the night to find the girls asleep, and bounded into their room. They were living in intimate proximity: Stalin’s bedroom and Nadya’s were linked by a door. From his bed or desk, he could see her dressing-table.
“What? Are you in bed already?” he roused the girls. “Get up you sleepy-heads! I’ve bought you roach and bread!” The girls jumped up and skipped into Soso’s bedroom, which “immediately became carefree and noisy. Stalin cracked jokes and caricatured all the persons he met that day, sometimes in a kindly way, sometimes maliciously.”
The autodidact seminarist and the well-educated teenagers discussed literature. He was playful and funny with their friends. He entertained them with stories of his adventures in exile, of Tishka the Siberian dog. He read them his favourite books—Pushkin, Gorky and Chekhov, particularly the latter’s stories “The Chameleon” and “Unter Prisibeev,” but he especially adored “Dushenka,” which he “knew off by heart.” He would often talk about women. “She’s a real Dushenka,” he would say of feather-headed women who lived only for their lovers with no independent existence. He teased their servant, the country girl Panya, and he gave them all nicknames. “When he was in a particularly good mood,” says Anna, “he addressed us as ‘Yepifani-Mitrofani,’” a joke on the name of his landlord in exile. “Well, Yepifani, what’s new?” he greeted the girls. “Oh you’re a Mitrofani, you are!” Sometimes he called them “Tishka,” after the dog.
He talked politics with Sergei and the girls: they were members of the Bolshevik family. Nadya was so proud to be a Bolshevik that she was teased about it at school. Her godfather Yenukidze, Kalinin, Sergo and Sverdlov were already like uncles. Lenin had hidden in their home.
In September, recounts Anna, “Stalin brought home a Caucasian comrade… squarely built with smooth black hair and a pale lustreless face… who shook hands with us all shyly, smiling with his large kind eyes.” “This is Kamo,” said Stalin. “Listen to him—he’s got plenty of interesting stories!” The girls were rapt:
