Young Stalin (49 page)

His first challenge was to defend his parliamentary star, Malinovsky, from a shocking accusation. An article identified Malinovsky as an Okhrana spy. Since the article was signed “Ts,” the Bolsheviks believed that the libeller was a Menshevik, Martov (real name Tsederbaum), or his brother-in-law Fyodor Dan. “The Bolshevik Vasiliev [Stalin] came to my apartment (he was known as ‘Ioska Koriavyi’ [Joe Pox]) trying to stop the rumours about Malinovsky,” said Fyodor Dan. Joe Pox warned Dan’s wife, Lidia, that she would regret it if the Mensheviks tried to smear Malinovsky.

Yet, thanks to Malinovsky, Stalin’s every move was now monitored by the Imperial Police director himself. On 10 February, Sverdlov was arrested, betrayed by Malinovsky. Now Stalin decided to appoint his Baku comrade Shaumian as
Pravda
’s editor, but Malinovsky persuaded Lenin that the Armenian would be too conciliatory, like Stalin himself. Lenin backed Malinovsky’s candidate, Chernomazov, who, as Stalin had divined back in Baku, was another Okhrana double-agent.

By February 1913, Malinovsky had betrayed the whole CC in Russia, except Stalin and the ineffectual Petrovsky. The Okhrana were determined to stop any SD reunion: Stalin the Conciliator was next.

On Saturday night, 23 February, Bolshevik sympathizers held a fund-raising concert and masquerade ball at the Kalashnikov Exchange, hardly Stalin’s usual scene. But the Alliluyev girls were excited about it. Stalin and their maths tutor, Kavtaradze, talked about going.

That afternoon, Stalin visited Malinovsky. The double-agent demanded he come to the ball. Stalin—as he later told Tatiana Slavatinskaya—refused, saying, “He wasn’t in the mood and didn’t have the right clothes. But Malinovsky kept insisting,” even reassuring him about security. The dapper traitor opened his dandyish wardrobe to Stalin, producing a stiff collar, dress shirt and silk cravat which he tied around Stalin’s neck.

Malinovsky had come almost directly from a meeting with his Okhrana controller, Imperial Police director Beletsky, probably promising to deliver Stalin.

“Vasily [Stalin] and I went to the party,” wrote his mistress, Tatiana Slavatinskaya, “and the party was nice.” Stalin, in his fancy cravat, sat at a
table with the Bolshevik Duma deputies. “I was really surprised to see . . . our dear Georgian boy . . . at such a crowded party,” Demian Bedny, a proletarian bard, who in the 1920s became one of Stalin’s closest courtiers, informed Lenin afterwards. “It was really impudent to go there—was it the devil’s work or some fool who invited him? I told him, ‘You won’t escape.’” Bedny hinted that there was a traitor in their midst.

At about midnight, plainclothed Okhrana officers, backed by Gendarmes, took up positions at the back of the concert hall where the guests sat at tables. “Stalin was actually chatting to Malinovsky himself,” noticed Tatiana, when “he spotted that he was being followed.”

The detectives approached Stalin’s table and asked his name. He denied he was Djugashvili. Comrades stood up around him and tried to smuggle him to safety behind the stage. “He went into the artists’ dressing-room,” says Slavatinskaya, “and asked them to get me.” Once again, Stalin resorted to dressing up in drag, but he managed to tell Tatiana that he had “visited Malinovsky before the party and been followed from there.” Stalin was made up and decked out in a long dress. As he was being led out through the dressing room, a secret policeman spotted his big shoes (and surely his moustache). The policeman “seized him with a yell.”

“Djugashvili, we’ve finally got you!”

“I’m not Djugashvili. My name is Ivanov,” replied Stalin.

“Tell those stories to y’grandmother!”

It was over.

“Two plain-clothed agents asked him to go with them. All was done quietly. The ball went on.” Malinovsky hurried “after Comrade Stalin ‘protesting’ his arrest and promising to take measures to free him . . .”

Lenin innocently wrote to the traitor to “discuss how to forestall more arrests.” Lenin and Krupskaya fretted that “Vasily” (Stalin) must be “well protected.” It was too late: “Why is there no news of Vasily? What has happened to him? We’re worried.”

Stalin’s arrest was regarded as enough of a success for Police Director Beletsky to inform Interior Minister Maklakov himself, who on 7 June 1913 confirmed the Special Committee’s recommendation: J. V. Djugashvili was condemned to four years in Turukhansk, an obscure Siberian realm of frozen twilights, forgotten by civilization.
²

*
“Solin” and “Safin,” the earlier versions of his new name, may have been typos because
sol
means “salt” in Russian: “Man of Salt” does not quite have the metallic sheen of the final version. When they were typesetting
Zvezda
in April 1912, says Vera Shveitzer, “The editorial board once changed the signature arbitrarily. The next day when J. V. Stalin opened
Zvezda
and saw the signature ‘Solin,’ he smiled: ‘I don’t like meaningless borrowed bylines.’” He returned to “K.St.” until January 1913. Stalin was not the only “industrial name”: Rosenfeld became “Kamenev”—Man of Stone (though he remained much too fluffy for the moniker); and Scriabin became “Molotov”—Hammer Man. There was also a fashion for taking aliases from jailers: Bronstein borrowed the name “Trotsky” from one of his prison warders. Contrary to many claims in Western biographies, “Stalin” is not a Russianization of Djugashvili:
Djuga
does not mean “iron” or “steel” in either Georgian or Ossetian.

PART FOUR

Over this land, like a ghost
He roamed from door to door;
In his hands, he clutched a lute
And sweetly made it tinkle;
In his dreamy melodies,
Like a beam of sunlight,
You could sense truth itself
And heavenly love.
The voice made many a man’s heart
Beat, that had been turned to stone;
It enlightened many a man’s mind
Which had been cast into uttermost darkness.
But instead of glorification,
Wherever the harp was plucked,
The mob set before the outcast
A vessel filled with poison . . .
And they said to him: “Drink this, o accursed,
This is your appointed lot!
We do not want your truth
Nor these heavenly tunes of yours!”

—SOSELO
(Josef Stalin)

33

“Darling, I’m in Desperate Straits”

T
he steamer that slowly conveyed Stalin up the Yenisei River from Krasnoyarsk in mid-June 1913 revealed a Siberia of inconceivable remoteness and wild vastness. His destination, Turukhansk, was larger than Britain, France and Germany combined, yet contained just 12,000 people.

The Yenisei flowed through narrow valleys with high terraces until it widened so far that he could peer across its glistening flatness and see no land at all. The Siberian
taiga
was hilly and forested with dense larch climbing to ridges of flat alpine tundra. It was green and lush in summer, but severe and icily white in a winter that lasted nine months a year, sinking to temperatures as low as—60°. Between villages of peasants and convicts, the colossal spaces were only rarely dotted with the tents and reindeer of the shamanistic Tungus and Ostyak nomads.

The game of escape, capture and escape again was over. This was, as Robert Service puts it, “a landbound Devil’s Island.” This time, though Stalin did not yet realize it, the Autocracy meant business. From Petersburg it took just over a week to reach the regional capital, Krasnoyarsk, whence he was despatched northwards into Turukhansk. It was Stalin’s home for four years but would enter his heart and never leave it.

After travelling for twenty-six days, he disembarked on 10 August at
the village of Monastyrskoe,
^*
the “capital” of Turukhansk Province. “As you see I’m in Turukhansk,” he wrote to Zinoviev (and Lenin) in Cracow. “Did you get my letter sent on the way? I’ve fallen ill. I need to recover. Send me some money.” He was already planning his escape: “If you need my help, let me know and I’ll come immediately.”

Lenin did need his help. On 27 July, he had held a CC meeting at which he had ordered that Stalin and Sverdlov be sprung from exile. Each was sent sixty roubles, but once again Malinovsky betrayed the plan to the Okhrana, which telegraphed Turukhansk police chief Ivan Kibirov, warning that Stalin was an escape-artist. The officers in such places were themselves effectively exiled: Kibirov, an Ossetian, had been removed from the Baku police and posted to Turukhansk for misdemeanours unknown. Possibly because of their shared Ossetian origins, he favoured Stalin.

Soso was assigned to stay in Miroedikha, a hamlet to the south where he soon made himself felt. An exile named Innokenti Dubrovinsky had drowned in the river that summer, leaving an impressive library. Exile etiquette decreed the sharing of the libraries of the dead, but typically Stalin “expropriated” the books, refused to share them and started to read them ravenously. The life of the exiles rotated around just this sort of petty quarrel which Stalin was so expert at provoking. The other exiles were outraged—they complained, and blackballed him. Philip Zakharov, a Bolshevik, confronted the book-thief, but Stalin treated his impertinent visitor “like a Tsarist General would receive a private soldier who had the insolence to appear before him with a request.” Stalin behaved like the
Khoziain
, the Master, long before he was dictator of Russia—indeed he had done so since childhood.

After just two weeks, he had to be moved (no doubt with his new library) to another hamlet, Kostino. There he found four other exiles, and this pedagogue manqué spent his time teaching two Georgian criminals to read. Soon he learned that his old roommate Sverdlov was nearby in Selivanikha.
¹

Around 20 September, Stalin visited Sverdlov, who lived in a peasant bathhouse. Staying together in the converted
banya
, they dreamed of escape. “I’ve just bidden farewell to Vaska [Stalin], my guest here for a week,” Sverdlov told Malinovsky, the last Bolshevik leader at liberty
inside Russia. “If you have money for me or ‘Vaska’ (they might have sent some), then send it . . . Last week, we wrote asking for some newspapers and magazines. Do what you can.” Malinovsky was certainly doing what he could to betray the two hopeful escapees.

On 1 October, Lenin and the CC, reacting to Stalin’s offer to Zinoviev, again proposed to spring him and Sverdlov, assigning one hundred roubles to the project. Within nineteen days, Stalin had “received an offer from a comrade in Petersburg to escape to the capital.” Stalin and Sverdlov prepared for this challenging escape, spending all their money and credit. The Bolshevik manager of the Canadian fur-trading company Revelion provided flour, sugar, tea and tobacco; the local doctor donated medicines; others forged passports.

The “doctor of escapology” was almost ready, but now winter was descending on the
taiga
. It was harsher and more desolate than anything the Georgian had experienced before. He was soon at the lowest ebb of his life so far. Daily life in Turukhansk was meant to be a struggle. If most Tsarist exiles were like holidays, Turukhansk was a slow death: many exiles perished out there from the extremities of weather. By early November, it was—33°, heading for—50°. Saliva froze on the lips, breath crystallized. And the cold made living much more expensive. Stalin appealed to his girlfriend Tatiana Slavatinskaya. His panic is obvious:

Tatiana Alexandrovna, I feel rather ashamed to write this but I have no other choice—my need is urgent! I don’t have a kopeck. All my supplies are gone. I had some money but everything was spent on warm clothes, shoes and food supplies which are very expensive here . . . By God, I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. Could you stir up some friends and raise 30 roubles? Maybe more later. It would be my salvation and the sooner the better since winter is in full swing (yesterday—33) . . . I hope you can do this. So, my dear, please get started. Otherwise “the Caucasian of Kalashnikov Exchange” is going to perish
. . . .

Tatiana not only sent him his old clothes but also bought him winter underwear. When it arrived, he was thrilled: “Darling dear Tatiana, I got your parcel. But I didn’t ask for new clothes, just the old ones, yet you’ve spent your money on new ones. Dear darling, it’s a shame because you’re short of money, but I don’t know how to thank you!” Even with his new clothes, Stalin begged Tatiana for money: “Darling, My need is more urgent with every passing hour. I’m in desperate straits: on top of every
thing, I got ill, a cough on the lungs. I need milk, money. I have none. My dear, if you find money, send it immediately. It’s unbearable to wait any longer . . .”

He must have been sending out letters to all his friends, particularly Malinovsky, the very man who had put him in Siberia: