Young Stalin

still so makeshift and amateurish that the only link with his new empire was a “cubby-hole for his telephone girl and typist” behind an unpainted wooden partition. It was surely no coincidence that Lenin’s two outstanding magnates, “Stalin and I,” writes Trotsky, “were the first to arrive.”

Then, from behind the wooden partition, the two of them overheard seductive and affectionate sighs: “a conversation of a rather tender nature” in the “thick basso of [People’s Commissar of the Navy] Dybenko, a blackbearded sailor, twenty-nine years old, a jolly and self-confident giant” who had recently “become intimate with Alexandra Kollontai, a woman of aristocratic antecedents approaching her forty-sixth year.” At this epoch-making moment, Stalin and Trotsky found themselves eavesdropping on Kollontai’s latest scandalous affair, about which “there’d been much gossip in Party circles.”

Trotsky and Stalin, two arrogant self-annointed Marxist messiahs, two magnificent administrators, deep thinkers, murderous enforcers, rank outsiders, a Jew and a Georgian, looked at each other. Stalin was amused, but Trotsky was shocked. “Stalin came up to me with a kind of unexpected jauntiness and pointing his shoulder towards the partition said, smirking: ‘That’s him with Kollontai, with Kollontai!’”[184] Trotsky was not amused:

“His gesture and laughter seemed to me out of place and unendurably vulgar especially on that occasion and in that place.”

“That’s their affair!” snapped Trotsky, at which “Stalin sensed he’d made a mistake.”

The amazing and unthinkable had happened: Stalin, the Georgian cobbler’s son, was close to the peak of a Russian oligarchical government, and almost instantly Trotsky was his natural rival.

Stalin, says Trotsky, “never again tried to engage me in conversation of a personal nature. Stalin’s face changed. His yellow eyes flashed with the glint of malice.”^{252}

EPILOGUE An Old Tyrant—in Remembrance of Things Past

Oh mother! Many a time
With his “hyena” sickle swinging,
Bare-chested, at the end of the cornfield
He must have suddenly burst out with a roar.

He must have piled up mountains
Of sheaves side by side,
And on his face governed by dripping sweat
Fire and smoke must have poured out.

But now he can longer move his knees,
Scythed down by old age.
He lies down or he dreams or he tells
His children’s children of the past.

From time to time he catches the sound
Of singing in the nearby cornfields
And his heart that was once so tough
Begins to beat with pleasure.

He drags himself out, trembling.
He takes a few steps on his shepherd’s crook
And, when he catches sight of the lads,
He smiles with relief.

—SOSELO (Josef Stalin)

On the lush hills above Gagra on the Black Sea coast, an old Georgian man, small, squat, paunchy, with thinning grey hair and a moustache, wearing a grey tunic and baggy trousers, sat on the verandah of a clifftop mansion, a fortified eyrie, with panoramic views, and talked to his elderly guests about how they grew up together…

The mtsvadi kebabs and spicy vegetable dishes of a Georgian supra were spread around the table with bottles of local red wine as the men talked in Georgian about their boyhoods in Gori and Tiflis, their seminary studies and their youthful radicalism. It did not matter that they had parted and followed their different paths, because the host “had never forgotten his schoolmates and fellow seminarists.”

In the years before his death, Generalissimo Stalin, Premier of the Soviet government and General Secretary of the Communist Party, conqueror of Berlin and supreme pontiff of world Marxism, the old Soso, exhausted by more than fifty years of conspiracy, thirty years of government, four years of total war, would retire for many months to his favourite seaside villa on the semi-tropical Black Sea of his homeland, to spend the days gardening, conspiring and reading—and the warm evenings talking in remembrance of things past.

Sometimes he talked to his magnates Molotov or Voroshilov, sometimes to his younger Georgian viceroys and proteges, but often “Stalin invited Georgian houseguests whom he’d known in his youth. When he had time,” recalls Candide Charkviani, First Secretary of the Georgian Party, whose name reminded Stalin of his patron, Father Kote Charkviani of Gori, “he kept in touch with his schoolmates. Stalin used to tell stories of his childhood and then remember his friends and decide he wanted to see them. So it was arranged to invite them to the house in Gagra.” Stalin enjoyed planning this dinner-party: “Let’s invite Peter Kapanadze and Vaso Egnatashvili… I wonder how Tseradze is? He was a famous wrestler… It would be good to get him along and…”

Whereupon Kapanadze, Egnatashvili and the other old men were gathered and driven from Tiflis to the Black Sea up into the hills, along the precipitous drive, through the steel gates and the drive-through guardhouse, to Stalin’s secret and heavily guarded mansion, Coldstream.

There, the guards brought them to Stalin, who was often clipping roses or weeding around his lemon-trees, reading on the verandah, writing in the wooden summerhouse that was balanced on the edge of the cliff or playing billiards. Dinner would be laid by almost invisible ladies in aprons who then disappeared. Stalin opened the Georgian