Young Stalin (46 page)

Stalin visited the Stasova apartment, where he collected the CC treasury which Elena had left with her brother on her arrest. He then bumped into an old girlfriend.

“I was on my way to teach down Nevsky Prospect,” says Tatiana Sukhova, “when suddenly I felt a man’s hand on my shoulder. It made me
jump but a familiar voice addressed me: ‘Don’t be afraid, Comrade Tatiana, it’s me!’ And there was Comrade Osip Koba standing next to me.” They arranged to meet at “some workers’ meeting.” Later they walked together and, “as we passed a café, Comrade Koba took a red carnation and gave it to me.”

Days later, he arrived in Tiflis, where his Bolshevik gangsters were assembling. Kamo was out.
²

Stalin had kept a distant eye on his demented brigand, Kamo. In Tiflis, Budu Mdivani and Tsintsadze were preparing to spring the prisoner from the Metekhi Fortress’s Unit for the Criminally Insane, where a doctor recorded Kamo’s bizarre behaviour: “Complains that mice bother him, though his building has no mice. Patient suffers from hallucinations. He hears strange voices, talks with someone, and is answered.” The guard who watched him “noticed that Ter-Petrossian rises during the night, catches something in the air, crawls under the table, trying to find something . . . complains someone is throwing stones in the room and when asked who, replies, ‘The devil’s brother.’” In fact, Kamo was planning his escape.

Kamo’s warder was a simpleton named Bragin whom he gradually charmed and then recruited as courier. Mdivani and Kamo’s sisters met Bragin and gave him escape tools, saws and ropes, which he smuggled in to his patient. Kamo sawed through the bars, replacing them with paste made from his bread. It took him five days to sever his shackles, which he held in place with wire.

On 15 August 1912, Mdivani and Tsintsadze’s Mauserists waved a handkerchief three times from the street. Kamo broke the shackles and bars and abseiled down the walls. The rope snapped and Kamo, who felt little pain, toppled into the Kura. Clambering out, he tossed his shackles into the river and walked to the nearest street, where he boarded a tram (to confuse search dogs) before making the rendezvous with the Mauserists.

One night, recalls Sashiko Svanidze, while police combed the city and the press sensationalized the escape, “Comrade Budu Mdivani came and told Misha [Monoselidze, her husband] that they’d sprung Kamo from the Mental Hospital the night before . . . They brought Kamo, who stayed for a month at our place.” Sashiko, Stalin’s son and her own children were then staying in the country, but Kamo looked after Mono
selidze for a month by cooking him delicious meals. Kamo, in disguise, then escaped abroad via Batumi and Istanbul.

“Kamo came to us in Paris,” recalls Krupskaya. “He suffered greatly from the split between Illich [Lenin] on one hand, and Bogdanov and Krasin
^*
on the other,” bewildered by the schism between the three heroes for whom he had performed his most outrageous bank robberies. Kamo wavered and Lenin “listened with great pity for this extremely daring but na’ive man with a fiery soul.” Lenin, like Stalin, knowing that concern and health care offered ways ofcontrolling his political protégés, offered to pay for an operation on Kamo’s damaged eye. After surgery in Brussels, Kamo set off to smuggle arms into Russia. He was arrested in Bulgaria and Istanbul, each time managing to charm his way to freedom. Back in Tiflis, Kamo assembled the Outfit. A mail coach with a huge sum of cash was expected to gallop down the main highway into the city. Around 22 September, Stalin, in charge of Party financial matters inside Russia, also arrived in Tiflis.

It was probably now that Tsintsadze, as Stalin recalled after the Second World War, gave the gangsters his pep talk in a private room at the Tamamshev Caravanserai on Yerevan Square before they rode up the Kadzhorskoe Highway.

On 24 September, Kamo and Tsintsadze, with Kupriashvili and about eighteen gunmen, ambushed the mail coach three miles outside Tiflis. The highwaymen tossed bombs at the police and Cossacks: three policemen and a postilion were killed. A fourth policeman was wounded but opened fire on the bank robbers. The holdup escalated into a brutal fire-fight. The gunmen failed to grab the money; the Cossacks rallied. When the Outfit eventually retreated, the Cossacks gave chase but Tsintsadze and Kupriashvili, both crack shots, covered their retreat, picking off seven Cossacks in a galloping battle down the Kadzhorskoe Highway.

It was the last bow of the Outfit. Kamo was tracked down to his hideout with eighteen of his gangsters. They were arrested. Kamo received four death sentences.

“I’m resigned to death,” Kamo wrote to Tsintsadze, “I’m absolutely calm. On my grave there should already be grass growing six feet high. One can’t escape death for ever. One must die one day. But I’ll try my luck once more and perhaps one day, we’ll laugh at our enemies again . . .”
³
This seemed highly unlikely.
^*

Soso did not linger in Tiflis.

*
Stalin told this story to Molotov on their way to the Teheran Conference in 1943 and to his son-in-law Yuri Zhdanov. Back in Narym, the district policeman found Stalin was missing the next day but waited to see if he would return from Tomsk. By the time the police reported his escape to the governor of Tomsk, who had issued an alert, it was 3 November and Stalin had been in Petersburg for weeks.

*
Krasin finally left active politics, but Lenin welcomed his return to the Bolsheviks after the Revolution, appointing him People’s Commissar for Trade, Industry and Transport, and later Ambassador to London. Krasin the engineer was one of the brains behind the refrigeration, embalming and displaying of the dead Lenin in 1924. He himself died in 1926.

*
Once again, Kamo cheated the noose, benefiting from the broad amnesty of Nicholas II on the three hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty in 1913. Kamo remained in jail for five years but lived to meet up again with Stalin and play out the ultimate insane violence after the Revolution. See the Epilogue. Of the female gangsters, Anneta and Patsia died of TB, as did many of the others. By the end of the 1930s, only Alexandra Darakhvelidze and Bachua Kupriashvili survived to leave their memoirs.

30

Travels with the Mysterious Valentina

S
talin was back in Petersburg, editing
Pravda
and staying with Molotov and Tatiana Slavatinskaya, within days of the failed robbery. He poured out articles,
^*
drafted the Manifesto and presided over the nomination for the Duma elections. After supervising the selection of the Bolshevik candidates in Petersburg in mid-October, he oversaw Malinovsky’s nomination in Moscow.

Soso’s life on the run was an exhausting series of “sleepless nights . . . He flitted from one place to another, crossing street after street to confuse the Okhrana, making his way through back alleys,” explains Anna Alliluyeva. “If happening to pass a workman’s café,” he “would sit there over a cup of tea until 2 a.m.,” or if noticed by a Gendarme, “he’d pretend to be tipsy and dive into a café, sitting it out until dawn with the cab-drivers amid the stench of cheap tobacco before coming to sleep in a friend’s place”—especially the Alliluyev apartment with the sensual Olga and her lively daughters. Stalin often “dropped in,” sitting on the sofa in their dining-room “looking very tired.”

The girls were always delighted to see him; their mother, Olga, looked after him. “If you feel like taking a rest, Soso,” said Olga, “go and lie on the bed. It’s no good trying to catch a nap in this bedlam. . .” Reading between the lines of Anna’s accounts, Soso still had a special relationship with Olga, at least in their devotion to the cause. When leaving their place, he would say to Olga, “Come out with me.” Olga “didn’t ask any questions. She put on her coat and went out with Stalin. Having plotted their course of action, they hired a cab and drove off. Stalin made a sign and Mother got out. He was evidently shaking the police off his tracks. Stalin continued his journey alone.”

Stalin invited Olga to the Mariinsky Theatre: “Please, Olga, let’s go to the Theatre immediately—you’ll just be in time for the opening performance.” But, just before the play, he added, “I did so want to see a play even just once, but I can’t.” Olga had to go on her own and deliver a message to a box at the Mariinsky.

On 25 October 1912, six Bolsheviks and six Mensheviks were elected to the Imperial Duma—not a bad result. Karlo Chkheidze, the Menshevik whom Stalin had outraged in Batumi in 1901, was elected Chairman of the SD faction with Malinovsky as his deputy. Among the “Bolshevik Six,” the Okhrana had managed to get two agents elected to the Duma, quite an achievement of
konspiratsia
. They took the Okhrana right into Lenin’s inner circle.

In
Pravda
, Stalin pushed for conciliation with the Mensheviks. When the Bolsheviks planned a demonstration outside the Duma, the Mensheviks persuaded them to abandon it. This alarmed Lenin, who bombarded Stalin with articles attacking his conciliatory policy. Remarkably, Stalin turned down forty-seven of Lenin’s articles. Lenin, now in Cracow, summoned Stalin and the Six. “Comrade Stalin,” remembered one of the Bolshevik Six, “immediatedly stated that the Bolshevik delegates had to visit Lenin abroad.”

On 28 October, the spooks observed Stalin visiting his friend Kavtaradze. They followed them when they went to eat in Fedorov’s restaurant, a favourite haunt, but after dinner the police agents realized that he had disappeared. They searched for Soso, but he had vanished.
¹

Lenin ordered Valentina Lobova, another of the liberated, capable girls of the Bolshevik generation, to accompany Stalin. She commissioned Lenin’s “foreign minister” and secret fixer Alexander Shotman to get Stalin to Cracow “with maximum speed and absolute security. This is a directive from Lenin.” Stalin “had arrived in Petersburg in the company of
Valentina Lobova,” in Shotman’s tactful words, “staying in a hotel as a Persian citizen with a good Persian passport in his pocket.”

Shotman explained the covert routes to Cracow—the riskier southerly route via Abo, or the longer, safer route by foot across the Swedish border at Haparanda. Stalin chose the Abo route. Then Stalin set off with Valentina Lobova, smuggled out of Petersburg in a covered cart. They caught the train to Finland from Levashovo Station, using Russian passports. In Finland, Eino Rakhia, later Lenin’s bodyguard, delivered a Finnish passport and accompanied the couple to the Abo steam-ferry. “Two policeman verified documents . . . Although Comrade Stalin . . . did not at all resemble a Finn, everything happily went off without a hitch.” Stalin and Valentina boarded the ferry across the Baltic to Germany.

This was another of Soso’s mysterious relationships. Valentina, code-named “Comrade Vera,” was a beauty married to a Bolshevik who was yet another Okhrana mole: the Party had never been more riddled with traitors. We do not know if she was aware that her husband was a doubleagent, but she was totally trusted by Lenin. Shotman’s memoir shows that Soso (on Persian papers, name unknown) had been travelling with Valentina for some time. They first came to Helsinki, sharing a room in a guesthouse, in “late summer,” possibly September, right after his escape from Narym. Shotman implies that they were together. Travelling hundreds of miles after September 1912, they were apparently lovers, one of those little affairs between comrades thrown together on dangerous missions. When Valentina’s husband was later executed as a traitor, it must have contributed to Stalin’s growing distrust of perfidious wives.
^*

The pair caught the train to Cracow in Galicia, a province of the Dual Monarchy of the Habsburg Emperor-King Franz-Josef.
²

Lenin adored Cracow. The Galician capital was an ancient Polish city. The sarcophagi of the Polish kings lay in the Royal Castle. And it was here that the Jagellonian University had been founded in 1364.

Lenin, Krupskaya, and her mother shared an apartment at 49 Lubomirski Road with CC member Zinoviev, his wife and son, Stepan. Lenin and Zinoviev formed the Party’s Foreign Bureau with Krupskaya as Secretary.
Cracow crackled with political intrigue, and reminded Lenin of home. “Unlike exile in Paris or Switzerland,” said Krupskaya, “there was a close connection with Russia”—4,000 of its 150,000 inhabitants were exiles from the Russian Empire, mainly Poles. “Illich liked Cracow very much. It was almost Russia.”

Lenin enjoyed himself ice-skating, while Krupskaya did the shopping in the ancient Jewish Quarter, where prices were lower. “Illich praised the Polish sourmilk and corn whisky.” He played hide-and-seek with Zinoviev’s son under the furniture. “Stop interfering, we’re playing,” he would say, dismissing interruptions—but he was eagerly awaiting Stalin and the Six.