Young Stalin (22 page)

The criminals were a real hazard. Usually they “respected our struggle,” said Stalin’s henchman Vyacheslav Molotov, who made a similar trip to Irkutsk, but they also terrorized the politicals. “During that
etap,”
Stalin told one of his adopted sons, “it was my fate to come up against a psychotic safe-breaker, a giant of a man, almost two metres tall. I made some harmless remark to him about my tobacco pouch . . . The exchange ended in a fight. The idiot forced me to the ground, breaking several ribs. No one helped me.” Stalin was knocked unconscious, but typically drew a political lesson: “As I was coming round, it occurred to me that politicians must always win over allies.” In future, the psychopaths would be on his side.
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On arrival in Irkutsk, the distant capital of Siberia, Stalin was despatched westwards to a regional centre, Balagansk, seventy-five versts from the nearest railway station. Now they travelled by foot and cart: Stalin was absurdly underdressed for the Siberian freeze, still in his white Georgian
chokha
with its bullet pouches. He found seven exiles in Balagansk and stayed with Abram Gusinsky, a Jewish exile, trying to avoid being sent farther.
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But he had been assigned to Novaya Uda. The local police recorded that “Josef Djugashvili, exiled by His Imperial Majesty’s command of 9 July, arrived on 26 November and was taken under police supervision.”

Novaya Uda, 70 versts from Balagansk and 120 from the closest station, thousands of versts from Moscow or Tiflis and his farthest exile, was a tiny town divided into two halves: the poor lived in shacks on a marshy promontory while the marginally better-off lived around a couple of shops, a church and a wooden fortress built to terrify into submission the local shamanistic Mongol tribe, the Buryats. There was little to do in Novaya Uda except read, argue, drink, fornicate and drink more—these were pastimes for locals and exiles alike. The settlement boasted five taverns.

Soso took to all these local pastimes, but he found his fellow exiles intolerable. There were three others in Novaya Uda, Jewish intellectuals
who were either Bundists (followers of the Jewish Socialist Party) or SDs. Stalin had met few Jews in the Caucasus but henceforth he encountered many of the Jews who had embraced Marxism as a means of escaping the repression and prejudice of the Tsarist regime.

Stalin opted for the poor part of town, staying in “the beggarly ramshackle two-room house of a peasant, Martha Litvintseva.” One room was a larder where the food was kept, the other, divided by a wooden partition, was the bedroom where the whole family lived and slept around a stove. Stalin slept on a trestle table in the larder on the other side of the partition: “At night, he lit a small lamp and read when the Litvintsevs were asleep.”
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Siberian exile was regarded as one of the most terrible abuses of Tsarist tyranny. It was certainly boring and depressing, but once settled in some godforsaken village, the exiles, intellectuals who were often hereditary noblemen, were usually well treated. Such paternalistic sojourns more resembled dull reading-holidays than the living hell of Stalin’s murderous Gulags. The exiles even received pocket-money from the Tsar—twelve roubles for a nobleman such as Lenin, eleven roubles for a school graduate such as Molotov, and eight for a peasant such as Stalin—with which to pay for clothes, food and rent. If they received too much money from home, they lost their allowance.

Wealthier revolutionaries could travel first-class. Lenin, who enjoyed a private income, financed his own trip to exile and behaved throughout like a nobleman on an eccentric naturalist’s holiday. Trotsky, who was subsidized by his father, a rich farmer, mused pompously that Siberia was a “test of our civic sensibilities” where the exiles could live happily “like gods on Olympus.” But there was a big gap between the well-off like Lenin and the penniless like Stalin.
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The behaviour of exiles was governed by a set of rules. Each settlement elected a committee which could try anyone who broke Party rules.
Books must be shared. If an exile died, his library was split between the survivors. No consorting with criminals. On departure, the exile was allowed to choose a gift from each fellow exile and should present a keepsake to his host family. Exiles divided the housework and the duty of collecting the mail. The arrival of the post was their happiest moment. “You remember how good it felt in exile to receive a letter from a friend?” recalled Yenukidze when he was in power.

Yet in the Wild East rules were hard to maintain: sexual adventures among the exiles were rife. “Like palms on a Diego Rivera landscape, love struggled towards the sun from under the heaviest boulders,” declaimed Trotsky grandiloquently, “couples came together . . . in exile.” When Golda Gorbman, who later married Stalin’s lieutenant Klimenti Voroshilov, was in exile, she was seduced and impregnated by Yenukidze, the Georgian who was later one of Stalin’s magnates. In power, the Politburo liked to reminisce about these scandals. Stalin himself never forgot the cheek of the exile Lezhnev, who bedded the local Prosecutor’s lovely wife and was sent to the Arctic as punishment. Molotov quoted the story of the two exiles who fought a duel for a mistress—one was killed and the other got the girl.

Exiles had to rent rooms from local peasants: they found themselves living in cramped and noisy little rooms, irritated by screaming children and lack of privacy. “The worst thing [about exile] was the lack of separation from the hosts,” wrote Yakov Sverdlov, later in exile with Stalin, but this sharing of rooms led also to more sexual temptation. Local custom banned affairs with exiles. But this was impossible to enforce: the local girls found the exiles exotic, educated, affluent and hard to resist—especially when they were often sharing the same bedroom.

Revolutionaries were naturally fractious, but their feuds in the isolation of exile had a malice all of their own. “Men bared themselves before you and showed themselves in their pettiness—there was no room to show decent features.” The exiles behaved appallingly, but Stalin’s conduct as reckless seducer, procreator of illegitimate children, serial feuder and compulsive troublemaker was one of the worst. No sooner had he arrived than Stalin started to break the rules.
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He cut his Jewish fellow exiles but embraced the local hobby: pubcrawls with the criminals. “There were some nice salt-of-the-earth fellows among them and too many rats among the politicals,” he told Khrushchev and the rest of the Politburo at their dinners in the 1940s. “I hung around mostly with the criminals. We’d stop at the saloons in town,
see if any of us had a rouble then we’d hold it up to the window, and drink up every kopeck we had. One day I’d pay, next day someone else.” This consorting with criminals was considered beneath the dignity of the snobbish middle-class revolutionaries. “Once they organized a comrade’s court,” says Stalin, “and put me on trial for the offence of drinking with criminals.” This was neither the first nor the last trial that the uncongenial Soso faced from his comrades.
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Yet he did not lose contact with the outside world or settle for a long stay. In December 1903, the mail brought a letter from Lenin. “I first met Lenin in 1903,” said Stalin, “not a personal meeting, more a postal one. It wasn’t a long letter but a bold and fearless critique of our Party.” He exaggerated. This was not a personal letter—Lenin had not yet heard of Stalin—but a pamphlet: “A Letter to a Comrade on Organizational Tasks.” Nonetheless its effect on Stalin was real enough. “That simple bold note reinforced my belief that in Lenin, the Party had a mountain eagle.”

Stalin burned it afterwards but he soon learned that at the SD Party’s Second Congress, held in both Brussels and London, Lenin and Martov had defeated their rivals the Jewish Bundists, who wanted to combine socialism with national territories for minorities. But then the victors had fallen out among themselves, Lenin demanding his exclusive sect of revolutionaries, Martov embracing a wider membership and mass worker participation. Lenin, who revelled in schismatic confrontations, split the Party, claiming that his group were the Majoritarians—Bolsheviki—and Martov’s the Minoritarians—Mensheviki.
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Stalin claimed that he wrote immediately to his lame Goreli friend Davitashvili in Leipzig, who was in contact with Lenin—but this was one of his fibs. In fact he did not write for almost a year, but he was already a
Leninist. Trotsky believed one could recognize a Bolshevik on sight. Stalin was, says Iremashvili, “an instant Bolshevik.” In 1904, there was a strong sense that something world-shattering was stirring: the movement was flourishing. As Nicholas II blundered closer to “a victorious little war” with Japan in his quest for a Far Eastern empire, the Revolution was suddenly closer than it had ever been. This was no time to be in Novaya Uda.
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Soso had no sooner arrived than he started to plan his escape—which was as much part of the revolutionary experience as arrest and exile itself.

Escape was “not too difficult. Everyone tried to escape,” wrote Trotsky. “The exile system was a sieve.”

The escapee needed money to buy his “boots”—the false papers. Usually the full escape kit—“boots,” food, clothes, train tickets, bribes—cost around one hundred roubles. Conspiracy-theorists ask naively how Stalin raised the cash: was he an agent for the Okhrana? Probably Egnatashvili, via Keke, and his Party comrades provided the money. But raising it was hardly unusual: between 1906 and 1909, over 18,000 obscure exiles out of a total of 32,000 somehow raised the money to escape.

Stalin made his record more suspicious by changing the number of his escapes and arrests in his own propaganda. Yet it turns out that he was arrested and escaped
more
often than he officially claimed. When he personally edited his
Short Course
biography in the 1930s, he signed off on eight arrests, seven exiles and six escapes, but when he re-edited the book in 1947, using his blue crayon, he reduced the numbers to seven arrests, six exiles and five escapes. In conversation, he claimed, “I escaped five times.” Amazingly, Stalin was being modest or forgetful. There were in fact at least nine arrests, four short detentions and eight escapes.

The last word belongs to Alexander Ostrovsky, expert on Stalin’s secret-police connections: “The fact of Stalin’s frequent escapes might be seen as surprising only to a person who is completely unfamiliar with the specifics of the pre-revolutionary exile system.”

Soso made his first, amateurish attempt after reading Lenin’s pamphlet in December 1903: his landlady and children gave him some bread for the trip. “Initially,” he told Anna Alliluyeva, “I didn’t succeed because the police chief had an eye on me. The freeze set in and then I collected winter supplies and set off on foot. My face almost froze!” As he got older, these tales grew taller. “I fell into a frozen river, the ice gave way,” he told his Soviet henchman Lavrenti Beria. “I was chilled to the bone. I knocked at a door,
nobody invited me in. At the end of my strength, I had finally the luck to be welcomed by some poor people who lived in a miserable hut. They fed me, warmed me by the stove and gave me clothes to reach the next village.”

He managed to make it to Abram Gusinsky’s house in Balagansk, seventy versts away.

One night, when there were terrible frosts of—30, we heard a knock.

“Who’s there?”

“Unlock the door, Abram, it’s me, Soso.”

Then an ice-coated Soso entered, dressed very flippantly for Siberian winter in a felt cloak, a fedora and a dandyish Caucasian hood. My wife and daughter so admired the white hood that Comrade Stalin with Caucasian generosity took it off and gave it to them.

He already had the “necessary documents.” But he could go no farther.

“Suffering frostbite on his nose and ears,” according to Sergei Alliluyev, “he couldn’t get anywhere and returned to Novaya Uda.” No doubt, his convict friends warmed him up in the boozing stews of the frontier-town while he planned his second attempt.

Soso wrote to Keke, and she “sewed the right clothes and sent them as soon as she could. Soso escaped wearing them.” He had moved into another house belonging to Mitrofan Kungarov, who, on 4 January 1904, gave Stalin a lift out of Novaya Uda. Arming himself with a sabre, Stalin tricked Kungarov, claiming that he just wanted to reach nearby Zharkovo to complain about the police chief. Kungarov was probably the drunken sledge-driver who demanded to be paid in vodka at every stop. “We travelled in—40 temperatures,” recalled Stalin. “I wrapped myself in furs. The coachman actually opened his coat while driving to let the bitter freezing wind blow against his almost naked belly. Apparently alcohol warmed his body: what healthy people!” But when the peasant realized that Stalin was escaping, he refused to help and stopped the sledge. “At that moment,” said Stalin, “I opened my fur coat and showed my sword and ordered him to drive on . . . The peasant sighed and made the horses gallop!”
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Soso was on his way. Coming up to Orthodox Epiphany, he was hoping the police would be distracted by their celebrations. “Exiled Josef Djugashvili has escaped! Appropriate measures are taken to recapture him!” telegraphed the local police. He made it to Tyret Station and may have gone to Irkutsk before heading back along the Trans-Siberian Railway.

The Siberian stations, even during holidays, were patrolled by uniformed Gendarmes and Okhrana spies, sometimes professionals, frequently informing freelancers, watching for escapees. But Stalin had procured not just the usual “boots” but the ID card of a police agent. In faraway Siberia (as in the Caucasus), any papers could be bought, but this was unusual. Stalin boasted that at one of the stations a real spook was on his tail, following him until the escapee approached a Gendarme, showed him his false ID and pointed out the police spy as an escaping exile. The policeman arrested the protesting spook while Stalin calmly boarded the train for the Caucasus. It is a story that demonstrates the layers of murkiness in which Stalin blossomed. If Soso really was a police spy, it is unlikely he would have told the story at all and, in any case, he might have invented it. But it certainly added to the mystique (and suspicion) of this ace of conspirators.
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