Union. 'Civility and politeness,' his booklet Problems of Life would instruct the proletariat, 'Civility and politeness and cultured speech are a necessary lubricant in daily relationships.' In 1913 he was just a hand-to-mouth expatriate, but he lived in a city lavish with civilities (if short on a few other things), and he was a quick study. He read his French novel during the ride home, where he proceeded to edit a Pravda article (on the new strikes in Moscow) in his unheated mansion, freezing in style.
A rather different Russian revolutionary arrived in Vienna during that glacial January week. He was thirty-four, exactly the same age as Trotsky, and when he stepped out of the train from Cracow at the North Terminal, not even the most Viennese of headwaiters would have been tempted to call him 'Herr Doktor Stalin.'
In fact, the name 'Stalin' had barely begun to exist. Only that week it had made its debut as a brand-new pseudonym in The Social Democrat, a legal Socialist periodical published in Russia. In its pages K. Stalin[1] attacked the editor of the Vienna Pravda as 'Trotsky, a noisy champion with fake muscles, a man of beautiful uselessness…'
And indeed K. Stalin was not good at noising clever words or beautiful phrases like Trotsky. Felicity of attire, elegance of limb did not distinguish him. In Cracow (then capital of the Austrian province of Galicia) he had just spent some weeks with Vladimir Lenin, chief of Russian Socialists abroad. Lenin had tutored him in the politics of exile; but he had also tried to teach him biking. The result was a bruised knee. And now, as K. Stalin walked from the North Terminal toward his first Viennese tram ride, he still limped a bit in his peasant boots. The sleeve of his coarse overcoat hung over his somewhat withered left hand. In his good right hand he carried a wooden box with a handle-a peasant suitcase. A thick peasant mus tache covered much of his face, but not enough to hide the pockmarks.
Of the five weeks he lived in Vienna (much more time than he would ever spend in any other city outside Russia), K. Stalin did not waste one hour in any of the town's intellectual coffeehouses. Yet he might have been a sensation at the Cafe Central because he would have beaten both Dr. Trotsky and Dr. Adler at chess. In Cracow he had trounced Lenin seven times in a row, and Lenin had not been a bit surprised. It was probably one of the reasons why he had dispatched 'our wonderful Georgian' to the Austrian capital.
The fact was that carnival-minded Vienna and this limping yokel shared a trait: a talent for disguise, for the cunning feint. Stalin's real name was Joseph Dzhugashvili. His passport read Stavros Papadopoulos. He had learned to give his Georgian gutturals a vaguely Greek cast. The tram he boarded by the North Terminal did not take him to any slum in which one might expect a Socialist to go undercover. No, K. Stalin rode toward the aristocratic district of Hietzing. He got off at Schonbrunner Schlossstrasse and walked toward No. 20. One of the most important missions of his prerevolutionary career began as he, his crude boots, and his wooden suitcase disappeared into a facade splendid with stucco garlands.
Just a few hundred yards away from Stalin's hide-out in the Schonbrunner Schlossstrasse loomed Schloss Schonbrunn, the vast Habsburg summer palace whose seclusion the Emperor Franz Joseph had begun to favor even in winter, now that he was eighty-three. Here a meeting took place the week of Stalin's arrival that also fit the carnival season. It was a sort of masquerade. But it was a masquerade that had gone on for years. The very opposite of merry make-believe, it involved the bitter summit level of political reality.
Its protagonist sat in a motorcar, as huge as it was hurried, which barely slowed for the opening of the palace gates. Abruptly, it crunched to a halt. Peremptorily, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Crown Prince of the realm, debarked. He scowled past the salutes of guards. To the clinking of the sabers of his entourage, to the blunt drumming of boots against parquet, he marched toward the emperor's study. His eyes were pale blue and glared. His black mustache was the fiercest south of Kaiser Wilhelm. His bruiser's shoulders, his wrestler's chest swelled the uniform of a general of the Imperial and Royal Army.
When he met Franz Joseph, the archduke's face glowered forward and swooped down as if to bite his sovereign's hand. Of course he only kissed it. But he kissed it unsmiling. Then he stood at grim attention, waiting for the Emperor's invitation to sit. It came. He sat. Instantly he hammered away at the Serbian Question.
A prickly matter; for Serbia, the feisty little kingdom, had become a thorn in the Empire's southeastern flank. Serbia was challenging Austria's predominance east of the Adriatic. Serbia subverted fellow-Slavs in the adjacent Habsburg province of Bosnia-Hercegovina; Serb-inspired radicals there smeared walls with slogans, threw stink bombs, plotted the assassination of Austrian governors. Most disturbing, only last year Serbia had destabilized the whole area in the Balkan War of 1912. With Bulgaria and Greece it had fought Turkey for the Sultan's European possessions. After victory, Serbia claimed much of Albania, hitherto under Ottoman rule but presently a strategic prize the Serbs could use against Habsburg. No wonder Serbia vexed Vienna even during Mardi Gras. Between toasts and tangos the question kept coming up: How severely must Serbia be disciplined? Or should it be utterly destroyed?
Serbia, then, was the inevitable subject of the All-Highest meeting at Schloss Schonbrunn. ('All-Highest' was Habsburg parlance for the Emperor.) The Crown Prince fulminated. But all the trappings of a fierceling-the booming basso, the vehement gestures, the trembling of medals on his chest-were deceptive. They disguised a fact to which very few were privy. The Crown Prince was a dove. A dove all the more ferocious because there was hardly any other in the Empire's highest council.
He utterly condemned, he said now, the thought behind the Chief of Staff's memorandum to the Emperor, the one dated January 20, a copy of which had just reached his chancellery. He loathed the lunacy of a preventive war against the Serbs. He detested all those trigger-happy fools who didn't realize that such rashness must provoke Russia as Serbia's great Slav protector. He couldn't emphasize too strongly to His Majesty that war between Russia and Austria would be a catastrophe for Habsburg and Romanov alike. Therefore, in view of recent tensions he must urge His Majesty to send a special emissary to St. Petersburg with a personal note for the Tsar stating Austria's peaceful intentions. Furthermore…
His Majesty listened. Franz Joseph had been on the throne for sixty-five years, but he still sat ramrod straight. His white sideburns, long become emblems of his empire, were just slightly turned away from all those 'furthermore's.' Not that he necessarily disagreed with them. But the man who thumped them out was so disagreeable. Franz Joseph followed the dictum of his forebear Franz I: A just ruler distributes discontent evenly. And this spouting nephew of his would never achieve any kind of evenness. Franz Ferdinand had a bully's temperament, and Franz Joseph did not like being subjected to it for one second longer than protocol demanded.
He rose. So did his nephew. With his low, supreme voice the Emperor said: 'I'll have it thought about.' Silence. Franz Ferdinand's mustache quivered as the Archduke swooped down for the hand kiss. His heels thundered away, down the parquet. Behind him, the sabers of his retinue clinked. To fight frostbite, the guards outside presented arms with extra energy. The liveried chauffeur cranked the motor of the mountainous Graf & Stift. The automobile roared through the palace gates, and His Imperial and Royal Highness, the heir apparent, was gone.
Most Viennese who saw the swerve of that automobile guessed who was riding in it. The darkness of the man's mood expressed itself in the brute speed of his driver. Onlookers shook their heads. The older ones remembered the Crown Prince before this one, the Archduke Rudolf. He, too, had been notorious for his rush, though his vehicle had been the twohorse fiacre. And where had these horses gotten him, too fast? To the hunting lodge in Mayerling where he had put a bullet through his temple. Now there was this newfangled motorborne Prince with his booming golden-spiked chariot. What impatience, what sullenness powered his thrust? Toward what end was he receding?
Let others worry. Josip Broz did not. If, on his holidays in Vienna, he watched Franz Ferdinand sweep past, he was not one to frown at the Habsburg prince. The archducal car was much too enthralling. A twenty-year-old mechanic, Broz came from Croatia, another Slav province the Serbs were subverting against Austria. In his mind, though, automobiles outranked ideologies. He worked at the Daimler auto plant at Wiener Neustadt, very close to the capital. There, as he was to confess later, he got his first 'whiff of glamor… from the big powerful cars with their heavy brasswork, rubber-bulb horns and outside handbrakes.' The best thing about his job was the thrill of test-driving exciting new models. Decades later he would glide in even longer limousines, his chest aglitter with more medals than an archduke's. But in 1913 Josip Broz was not yet Marshal Tito. He didn't see the world as primarily a political arena. For him Vienna was a seductive metropolis where he spent much of his wages on dancing and fencing lessons and on any pretty girl whose eye he might catch from an adjoining cafe table. Many of his best young weekends were Viennese. Saturday night and all day Sunday he was a playboy by the Danube.
The Emperor received the Crown Prince on January 24, a Friday. Just on that Friday, Broz might have been in
