AFTERWORD

 

 

MY ONE WORRY when editor David Thomas Moore approached me with the concept of writing a novella based on the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery was whether there’d be enough material there to spin a story, even a mere novella-length story, out of. We’re so used to phrases like “Based on Historical Events” meaning something closer to “People with the same names as these characters really lived and did vaguely similar things, except one of them had died by this point and another was thirty years younger and also the events we’ve crammed into a week took place over the course of eighteen months.” And among the reasons for that generally high level of inaccuracy is that history doesn’t much care for the poor writer who tries to dramatize its bewildering tangles years or decades or centuries later. History, as a rule, tends to be a right old mess, and its drama a different sort to that which fits neatly between book covers or the credits of a movie.

With that in mind, I wouldn’t at all blame the sceptical reader who spent their time with this book wishing the author couldn’t stick to the facts and keep from embellishing them with so many implausible eccentricities. However, in this case, they’d be wrong: almost everything you’ve just read, no matter how incredible or absurd, is as faithful to the known history as I could make it. So yes, to pick an obvious example, the future Joseph Stalin really did recruit a banking office insider via an admiration of his youthful poetry, and they really did have their fateful discussion over a glass of milk.

It actually turns out to be easier to list what I cut from whole cloth rather than what I didn’t, since there’s a total of one scene where I strayed deliberately from what’s known or believed to have occurred. While the essential elements of the chapter they appear in are genuine, it’s unlikely to have been Mikha and Maro Bochoridze who delivered the mattress full of stolen cash to the Tiflis observatory; what mention we have refers to the deed being undertaken by porters. And the policeman Tugushi, who runs afoul of Kamo and one of his gunslinger girls, is the sole named character in the book that I invented, though again, the details surrounding his encounter are heavily based in reality.

In the end, then, my bigger concern was an overabundance of good material, and the question of what to cut when there was so much I’d have loved to incorporate. Reducing Kamo’s post-heist misadventures to a handful of paragraphs in the epilogue, for example, was heart-breaking, and I clearly remember the day I realised that to include them properly wouldn’t be feasible. And there as elsewhere, the pressure was more to try and rationalise the improbabilities than to concoct drama where there wasn’t any: Kamo, frankly, deserves an entire book to himself. Of course, the same could be said for Koba, but unsurprisingly, many a historian and author has got there already. For those who’d like to know more about the years that shaped him into one of the twentieth century’s most savage and contradictory figures, I’d heartily recommend Simon Montefiore’s Young Stalin, a superb work of history and biography that was invaluable in the writing of this novella.

Lastly, a few thank yous: to David Thomas Moore, for offering me one of the more fascinating and challenging projects I’ve ever had the good fortune to be involved with; to Professors Maggie Tallerman and George Hewitt for their advice and guidance; to Hanaa at JSTOR for her kind assistance; to my indispensable beta reader Tom Rice; and, as always, to my friends and family for their enthusiasm and support.

 

 

David Tallerman

September 2020