Young Stalin (35 page)

Stalin neither denied nor admitted his role in the heists, but insisted, “Never in my life was I tried before any Party organization and expelled,” which was probably literally true because the Committees in Tiflis and Baku were Menshevik, not Bolshevik, and any expulsion was informal. Witnesses were going to be summoned to Moscow, but it was hard to do so during the Civil War. The trial was cancelled, and Martov reprimanded, but Stalin had made his point.

“You’re a wretched individual,” he snarled at Martov, who went into exile.
^*
When Stalin returned to Tiflis in 1921 as a conquering Bolshevik, he was booed at a meeting and openly called a “bandit” to his face: he stormed out. Stalin’s brigandage and expulsion were never mentioned again during his reign.

Most important, Lenin did not take Stalin’s local expulsions seriously: “Such expulsions are almost always based on errors, unverified reports or misunderstandings . . .” Of course he knew more about it than he let on, but he increasingly recognized that Stalin, terrorist, gangster and covert organizer, had the “right stuff.”
³

The uproar about the Georgian job had been spectactular, but the heists were not over yet. The game of “bandits and Cossacks” was rougher still in Baku, where the stakes were much higher than in Tiflis. They proved too high for Kato.

*
The Bolshevik position in Georgia was undermined by the assassination of the hugely popular Prince Ilya Chavchavadze, who had published Soso’s poems, in August 1907. The Bolsheviks had attacked his patriarchical version of Georgian culture and, it was widely believed, had decided to kill him; there is some evidence that Stalin’s friend Sergo Ordzhonikidze organized or took part in the assassination. It may be that the SDs played no role in the murder at all. Stalin always praised Chavchavadze’s poetry in his old age and there is no evidence that he ordered the hit, but he was very close to Sergo and he was certainly more than capable of separating literary merit from cruel necessity: politics always came first.

†
Stalin himself later implied he was in the Tamamshev Caravanserai and saw Tsintsadze give the gangsters their pep talk, but Tsintsadze had just been arrested. Perhaps the old dictator was muddling this bank robbery with another, that of 1912 (see
Chapter 29
). In 1907 Kamo was presumably the pep talker.

*
The other gangsters, who had actually conducted many more heists, were jealous of Kamo’s fame. “Our Outfit was called the Kamo Group,” says Bachua Kupriashvili, “but it wasn’t true. We accepted Kamo into the group over a year after it had been set up. He played his role in this big action after which everything was ascribed to him . . . But Kote Tsintsadze, Intskirveli, Eliso Lominadze . . . were not inferior and probably superior to Kamo.”

†
Lenin published an epistemological polemic, “Materialism and Empiricism,” which attacked Alexander Bogdanov’s mystical philosophical relativism, which he believed threatened Marxist materialism.

*
After Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin’s Bolshevik legitimacy became hugely important as he tried to prove himself worthy to become the heir. If Martov had proved Stalin’s expulsion, he might have saved Russia from Stalinism.

21

The Tragedy of Kato: Stalin’s Stony Heart

S
talin settled Kato and Laddie, their baby, in the apartment of an oil worker and plunged himself into a life of banditry, espionage, extortion and agitation, the murkiest years of his entire career. Probably again on the Rothschild payroll, he soon moved his little family outside Baku city into a “Tartar house with a low ceiling on the Bailov Peninsula which he rented from its Turkish owner,” just above a cave, right on the seaside.

Kato, a born homemaker, made the shack cosy, with a wooden bed, curtains and her little sewing-machine in the corner. Visitors noticed the contrast between the sordid exterior and the tidiness inside—but Soso was not often there. Kato did not know many people, but Sergei Alliluyev visited them. He was now the manager of the local power plant and lived with Olga and the children in a villa by the sea. It was here in Baku that their youngest daughter, Nadezhda, wearing a pretty white dress, fell over the edge of their sunny yard into the Caspian Sea. Stalin jumped in and rescued her, a romantic tale, often retold as she grew up.

Always dressed in his trademark black fedora, Stalin gave a speech on 17 June 1907, the very day he arrived, and threw himself into his editing of the two Bolshevik newspapers,
Bakinsky Proletary
and
Gudok
(Whistle); he immediately set about dominating the Party there with his brand of aggressive politics, terrorist intimidation and gangster fund-raising.

Everywhere in Russia, “The reaction had triumphed, all liberties
destroyed and revolutionary parties smashed,” recalls Tatiana Vulikh, but Baku, ruled as much by the oil companies and corrupt policemen as by the Tsar’s governors, followed its own rules. Stalin was on the run in Tiflis, but for a few months before Stolypin’s next crackdown he could stroll the Baku streets. Tiflis, said Stalin contemptuously, had been a parochial “marsh” but Baku “was one of the revolutionary centres of Russia,” its oil vital to the Tsar and the West, its workers a true proletariat, its streets violent and lawless. Baku, wrote Stalin, “would be my second baptism of fire.”
¹

Baku was a city of “debauchery, despotism and extravagance,” and a twilight zone of “smoke and gloom.” Its own governor called it “the most dangerous place in Russia.” For Stalin, it was the “Oil Kingdom.”

Baku was created by one dynasty. Swedish by origin, Russian by opportunity and international by instinct, the Nobels made their first fortune selling land mines to Tsar Nicholas I, but in 1879, the year of Baku’s first “fountain” of oil, the brothers Ludwig and Robert Nobel founded the Nobel Brothers Oil Company in the town known mainly for the ancient Zoroastrian temple where Magi priests tended their holy oil-fuelled flames.
^*
The drilling had already started; entrepreneurs struck oil in spectacular gushers.

The Nobels started to buy up land particularly in what became the Black City. Another brother, Alfred, invented dynamite, but Ludwig’s invention of the oil tanker was almost as important. The French Rothschilds followed the Nobels into Baku. By the 1880s, Baron Alphonse de Rothschild’s Caspian Black Sea Oil Company was the second biggest producer—and its workers lived in the industrial township called the White City.
^†
By 1901, Baku produced half the world’s oil—and the Nobel Prize, established that year, was funded on its profits.

Its oil boom, like the Kimberley Diamond Fever or the California Gold Rush, turned peasants into millionaires overnight. A dusty, windy ex-Persian town, built on the edge of the Caspian around the walls and
winding streets of a medieval fortress, was transformed into one of the most famous cities in the world.

Its “barbaric luxury” filled the newspapers of Europe, scintillated by instant riches, remarkable philanthropy and preposterous vulgarity. Every oil baron had to have a palace, many as big as a city block. Even the Rothschilds built one. The Nobels’ palace was called Villa Petrolea, and was surrounded by a lush park. One oil baron insisted on building his palace out of gold but had to agree to cover it with goldplate because the gold would melt; another built his mansion like the body of a giant dragon with the entrance through its jaws; a third created his vast palace in the shape of a pack of cards emblazoned in golden letters: “Here live I, Isa-Bey of Gandji.” A popular singer made his fortune when a performance was rewarded by some land on which oil was struck: his neo-classical palace is now the headquarters of Azerbaijan’s state oil company.

Baku was a melting-pot of pitiful poverty and incredible wealth, its streets, observes Anna Alliluyeva, full of “red-bearded Muslims . . . street porters called
ambal
s bent under excessive loads . . . Tartar hawkers selling sweetmeats, strange figures in whispering silks whose fiery black eyes watched through slits, street barbers, everything seemed to take place in the streets,” crowded with tribesmen in pleated coats with jewelled daggers, Persians in waistcoats and felt hats, Mountain Jews in fur hats, and Western millionaires in frock coats, their wives in French fashions. Stalin called its workforce of Turkish Azeris, Persians, Russians, Chechens and Armenians “a national kaleidoscope.” The rich promenaded down the Seaside Esplanade shadowed by carriages of gun-toting bodyguards.

Yet the source of all this money, the derricks and the refineries, poisoned the city and corrupted the people. “The oil seeped everywhere,” says Anna Alliluyeva. “Trees couldn’t grow in this poisonous atmosphere.” Sometimes it bubbled out of the sea and ignited, creating extraordinary waves of fire.

The Black and White Cities and other oil townships were polluted slums. The 48,000 workers toiled in terrible conditions, living and fighting each other in grimy streets “littered with decaying rubbish, disembowelled dogs, rotten meat, faeces.” Their homes resembled “prehistoric dwellings.” Life expectancy was just thirty. The oilfields seethed with “lawlessness, organized crime and xenophobia. Physical violence, rapes and bloodfeuds dominated workers’ everyday lives.”

Baku, states Stalin, was “irrepressible,” its rootless proletariat ideal for the Bolsheviks. It was especially corrupt; its moral ambiguities and
duplicitious opportunities suited Stalin’s conspiratorial cynicism. It was said that there were only ten honest men in the entire city (a Swede—Mr. Nobel, of course—an Armenian and eight Tartars).

“Equal parts Dodge City, medieval Baghdad, industrial Pittsburgh and nineteenth-century Paris,” Baku “was too Persian to be European but much too European to be Persian.” Its police chiefs were notoriously venal; its Armenians and Azeris armed and vigilant; its plentiful gunmen, the
kochi
s, either performed assassinations for three roubles a victim, guarded millionaires or became “Mauserists,” gangsters always brandishing their Mausers. “Our city,” writes Essad Bey, “not unlike the Wild West, was teeming with bandits and robbers.”

In Baku, brashly taking on oil barons, and Menshevik and Bolshevik “rightists,” Stalin prospered to become the revolutionary and criminal kingpin of the Oil Kingdom. It was through Baku
^*
that he, belatedly, found a national Russian role, graduating from “an apprentice to a craftsman of the Revolution.” Here he became the “second Lenin.”
²

In August 1907, when poor Kato was suffering grievously from the stifling, polluted heat of Baku, Stalin returned to Germany to attend the Congress of the Second International in Stuttgart. He met up with Alyosha Svanidze, still studying at Leipzig. Soso and his brother-in-law, writes Monoselidze, “went sightseeing, visiting meetings of German workers in restaurants, and cafés.”

The Germans “are a queer people like sheep,” Stalin later told the Yugoslav leader Milovan Djilas (he told Churchill the same story). “Wherever the ram went, they just followed.” On the way to the conference, some German Communists felt unable to leave the station because there was no ticket-collector. They were so obedient to the rules that, Stalin said, “They actually missed the meeting for which they’d made the entire trip.” He joked that a Russian comrade had shown them a “simple solution: leave the platform without handing in the tickets!”
³

Soso was back in Baku in time for another outbreak of ethnic turbulence. On 19 September, an Azeri worker named Khanlar was murdered
by Russian nationalists. In protest the workers went on strike. Stalin spoke at the funeral demonstration.

At a meeting soon afterwards, he and the Bolsheviks routed the Mensheviks and took control of the local organization: Baku became a Bolshevik city. Soso concentrated on his work, but, Monoselidze notes, “when he was involved, he forgot everything”—including Kato.

“Soso loved her so much,” says Elisabedashvili, who joined him in Baku. “Wife, child, friend were only okay if they didn’t hinder his work and saw things his way. You had to know Soso to understand his love.”

“It was too hot in Baku” for Kato. “Soso would go early in the morning and return late at night while Kato sat at home with a tiny baby terrified that he would be arrested,” remembers Monoselidze. “Bad diet, little sleep, the heat and stress weakened her and she fell ill. Surrounded by strangers, she had no friends around her. Soso was so busy he forgot his family!”

Stalin knew he was being a neglectful husband and father, but, like many who have suffered broken families, he could not change his behaviour. He must have talked about it with Elisabedashvili: “Soso regretted it and was angry at himself for having married in such circumstances.”