Young Stalin (37 page)

Kavtaradze assisted Soso with the planning under the aegis of his portentously named Self-Defence Headquarters. Stalin’s other sidekick was a red-haired lawyer, born in Odessa, son of a well-off Baku family with noble Polish antecedents: Andrei Vyshinsky, now twenty-three, a Menshevik, had given up the law, organized terrorist gangs and become a hit man in 1905. But Stalin, perhaps recognizing a usefully ruthless young rogue, relaxed his anti-Menshevik rigour. He commissioned Vyshinsky to procure arms and bombs.

“Politics is a dirty business,” Stalin said later. “We all did dirty work for the Revolution.” Stalin became the effective godfather of a small but useful fund-raising operation that really resembled a moderately successful Mafia family, conducting shakedowns, currency counterfeiting, extortion, bank robberies, piracy and protection-rackets—as well as political agitation and journalism.

Stalin’s aim, says one of his Mauserists, Ivan Bokov,
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was “to threaten the oil tycoons and Black Hundreds [the right-wing Russian nationalists who had their own armed groups].” He ordered the Mauserists to murder many of the Black Hundreds, according to Bokov. Then the Outfit planned to rob the Baku State Bank. Kavtaradze explains that “we learned that 4 million roubles for the Turkestan Region were being transported by ship via Baku and the Caspian Sea. Therefore at the start of 1908 we started to assemble in Baku.” They would take the captain hostage—echoes of the
Tsarevich Giorgi
.

An act of piracy took place on a ship named the
Nicholas I
in Baku port: the Mensheviks investigated Stalin for this outrage, yet another infringement of Party rules. At the 1918 libel trial, Martov had enough evidence of Stalin’s participation in the
Nicholas I
heist to call for witnesses. Later, the Trotskyite Victor Serge wrote that Vyshinsky, in a rash admission before the Bolsheviks came to power, had said, “Koba was deeply embroiled” in “the expropriation on the steamer
Nicholas I
in Baku harbour.”

Next, “Stalin thought up the idea” to raid the Baku naval arsenal. As ever, “He took the initiative to make us the [inside] connections with naval people,” reminisced his gunman Bokov. “We organized a gang of comrades . . . and raided the arsenal,” killing some of the guards. But Soso was also raising money day to day through “contributions from industrialists.”

Many tycoons and middle-class professionals were sympathetic contributors to the Bolsheviks. Berta Nussimbaum, wife of an oil baron and mother of the writer Essad Bey, was a Bolshevik sympathizer. “My mother,” Essad Bey says, “financed Stalin’s illicit communist press with her diamonds.” It remains astonishing how the Rothschilds and other oil barons, among the richest tycoons in Europe, funded the Bolsheviks, who would ultimately destroy their interests. Alliluyev remembered these Rothschild contributions.

The Rothschild managing director, David Landau, regularly contributed to Bolshevik funds, as recorded by the Okhrana—whose agents noted how, when Stalin was running the Baku Party, a Bolshevik clerk in one of the oil companies “was not active in operations but concentrated on collecting donations and got money from Landau of the Rothschilds.” It is likely that Landau met Stalin personally. Another Rothschild executive, Dr. Felix Somary, a banker with the Austrian branch of the family and later a distinguished academic, claims he was sent to Baku to settle a strike. He paid Stalin the money. The strike ended.

Stalin regularly met another top businessman, Alexander Mancho, managing director of the Shibaev and Bibi-Eibat oil companies. “We often got money from Mancho for our organization,” recalls Ivan Vatsek, one of Stalin’s henchmen. “In such cases, Comrade Stalin came to me. Comrade Stalin also knew him well.” Either Mancho was a committed sympathizer or Stalin was blackmailing him, because the businessman coughed up cash on request at even the shortest notice.

Stalin was also running protection-rackets and kidnappings. Many tycoons paid if they did not wish their oilfields to catch fire or “accidents” to befall their families. It is hard to differentiate donations from protection-money, because the felonies Stalin now unleashed on them included “robberies, assaults, extortion of rich families, and kidnapping their children on the streets of Baku in broad daylight and then demanding ransom in the name of some ‘revolutionary committee,’” states Sagirashvili, who knew him in Baku. The “kidnapping of children was a routine matter at
the time,” recalls Essad Bey, who as a boy never went out without a phalanx of three
kochi
bodyguards and a “fourth servant, mounted and armed, who rode behind me.”

Baku folklore claims that Stalin’s most profitable kidnapping was that of Musa Nageyev, the tenth richest oil baron, a notoriously stingy ex-peasant who so admired the Palazzo Cantarini in Venice that he built his own (bigger) copy—the majestic Venetian-Gothic Ismailiye Palace (now the Academy of Sciences). Nageyev was actually kidnapped twice, but his own accounts of these traumas were confused and murky. Neither case was ever solved, but Bolshevik involvement was suspected. Years later, Nageyev’s granddaughter, Jilar-Khanum, claimed that Stalin jokingly sent the oil baron thanks for his generous contributions to the Bolsheviks.
^*

It was said that the millionaires like Nageyev were keen to pay up after a “ten-minute conversation” with Stalin. This was probably thanks to his system of printing special forms that read:

The Bolshevik Committee
proposes that your firm
should pay___roubles.

The form was delivered to oil companies and the cash was collected by Soso’s technical assistant—“a very tall man who was known as ‘Stalin’s bodyguard,’ visibly packing a pistol. Nobody refused to pay.”

The Bolshevik boss befriended organized crime in Baku, their operations and those of the Mauserists often overlapping. One gang controlled access to some wasteland in the Black City section. Stalin “made an agreement with the gang only to let through Bolsheviks, not Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks had special passwords.” In Russia’s wildest city, both sides used
violence: the oil tycoons employed Chechen ruffians as oilfield guards. One of the richest oil barons, Murtuza Mukhtarov, who resided in Baku’s biggest palace based on a French Gothic château, ordered his
kochis
to kill the young Stalin. Soso was badly beaten up by Chechens, probably on Mukhtarov’s orders.
^*

Stalin’s secrecy was so absolute that the Mauserist Bokov said, “It was sometimes so conspiratorial that we didn’t even know where he was for six months! He had no permanent address and we only knew him as ‘Koba.’ If he had an appointment he never turned up on time; he turned up either a day early or a day later. He never changed his clothes, so he looked like an unemployed person.” Soso’s comrades noticed that he was different from the usual passionate Caucasian. “Sentiment was foreign to him,” says one. “No matter how much he loved a fellow, he’d never forgive him even the tiniest spoiling of a Party matter—he’d skin him alive.”

So again he succeeded in raising money and guns, but with him there was always a human cost. The traditional Bolsheviks like Alexinsky and Zemliachka were “very indignant at these expropriations” and killings. “Stalin blamed one member for provocation. There was no definite evidence, but that person was forced out of the city, ‘judged,’ condemned to death and shot.”

Stalin prided himself on being what he called a
praktik
, a practical hard man, an expert on what he called “black work,” rather than a chatty
intelligent
, but his gift was for being both. Lenin soon heard a storm of complaints about Stalin’s banditry, but by now, writes Vulikh, Stalin “was the true boss in the Caucasus” with “a lot of supporters devoted to him who respected him as the second person in the Party after Lenin. Among the intelligentsia, he was less loved, but everybody recognized that he was the most energetic and indispensable person.”

Soso had an “electrical effect” on his followers, of whom he took good care. He had a talent for political friendship that played a major role in his
rise to power. His roommate from Stockholm, Voroshilov, the eager, fair-haired and dandyish lathe-turner,
^*
joined him in Baku but fell ill. “He visited me every evening,” said Voroshilov. “We joked a lot. He asked if I liked poetry and recited a whole Nekrasov poem by heart. Then we sang together. He really had a good voice and fine ear.” “Poetry and music,” Stalin told Voroshilov, “elevate the spirit!” When Alliluyev was arrested again, he worried about his family, so once released he came to consult Soso, who insisted he had to leave, giving him cash to move to Moscow. “Take the money, you’ve children, you must look after them.”

The death of Kato was a grievous blow, but even in early 1908 the widower who signed his articles “Koba Kato” found time for partying, and never lacked female company.

*
Stalin’s reaction to the death is very similar to his behaviour after the suicide of his second wife, Nadya Alliluyeva, in 1932, down to the suicide threat, self-pity and blaming himself for neglect.

†
The announcement of the death read: “We notify our comrades, friends and family of the death of Ekaterina Semyonovna Svanidze Djugashvili, expressing the deepest sorrow on behalf of Josef, husband, Simon and Sepora, parents, and Alexandra, Alexander and Mariko, siblings.” Mikheil Monoselidze adds, “In 1936, I buried my wife, Sashiko, next to Kato.” Sashiko died of cancer, but it might have been a mercy. By the early 1930s, the Svanidzes were among Stalin’s most intimate courtiers. But their fortunes would be suddenly and terribly reversed: their story is told in the Epilogue. The Tiflis grave, with photographs of Kato and Sashiko, is still there; so is an old fence at the back of the cemetery, perhaps the one Stalin vaulted to escape the police. Among the gravediggers, there is a story that because Kato died of typhus, the authorities first tried to bury her in a mass “plague grave” but that the family recovered the body and buried her themselves.

*
He met up again now with his comrades from Tiflis such as Sergo, Budu “the Barrel” Mdivani, Alliluyev, Kavtaradze, the gangster Tsintsadze, most of the Outfit—and the tall, blue-eyed Shaumian. Stalin’s new friend Voroshilov and his old friend Yenukidze were soon joined by Lenin’s special agent, the well-connected but severe noblewoman Elena Stasova (“Comrade Absolute”), Rozalia Zemliachka, Alexinsky and a girl named Ludmilla Stal. But there were also many Mensheviks from his past, such as Devdariani. It was a small world.

*
Stalin’s career in Baku is shadowy, but the memoirs of the Mauserists give us helpful clues. They could not be used in the Soviet era, especially during Stalin’s dictatorship, and are mostly unpublished, but they remain in the archives.

*
In his first kidnapping, Nageyev’s ransom was 10,000 gold roubles—or his kidnappers threatened to cut him into pieces. “I can pay only 950 roubles,” Nageyev replied. “Of course you can slice me up, but then you won’t get anything.” He paid only the 950. Then in December 1908, Nageyev was again kidnapped by gangsters led by “a Georgian with black hair and unusual pockmarks.” Nageyev supposedly paid 100,000 roubles. Stalin was at liberty in Baku for the first kidnapping, but in Baku Jail for the second. Had Stalin been at liberty on the latter occasion, he would still not have participated directly. In any case, he ran his criminal-terrorist organization from his cell: he could easily have ordered either or both kidnappings. On the other hand, the story does not appear in any of the Bolshevik memoirs, and in 1909 newspapers claimed the second gang of kidnappers were rogue policemen linked to deputy city governor Colonel Shubinsky. Nonetheless Nageyev probably contributed to Bolshevik funds like the other oil barons. Like them, too, he lost his fortune in the Revolution; he died in 1919.

*
The beating-up was a humiliation that may have contributed to his brutal deportation of the entire Chechen race during the Second World War at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. Equally, he deported many other peoples during the war and victimized other races such as the Poles and Koreans with whom he had had no such experience. As for Mukhtarov, he refused to surrender his palace to the Bolsheviks when the Red Army took Baku in 1920. “As long as I am alive, no barbarian in army boots will enter my house!” In a shoot-out, he fired on the Bolsheviks until he was overcome, at which point he shot himself. His beautiful wife, Liza-Khanum, for whom his Baku château was built, lived on in the basement, then escaped to Turkey, where she lived until the 1950s. Mukhtarov’s château is now the Baku Wedding Palace.

*
When Marshal Voroshilov was out of Stalin’s favour in his last years, he used to plead: “But, Koba, we became friends in Baku in 1907.” “I don’t remember,” Stalin replied. For his future life, see the Epilogue.

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