Three
PARTY WORKER
The split in 1903 left the party newspaper, Iskra, in Menshevik hands, but as the tide of unrest in Russia rose higher Lenin was joined by a number of intellectuals who found his militancy appealing. Throughout 1904 he devoted himself to founding his own newspaper, which he called Vpered (Forward) and which began to appear in December of that year, and to rebuilding his own organization, not as a faction of the party but as the party itself. He set out to recapture the party title from the Mensheviks, and in 1906 created a secret Bolshevik Centre that would operate purely in his interests, regardless of any new arrangements with the Mensheviks or other parts of the party.
The obscurity about Stalin’s early years created by Soviet propaganda dissipates to a great extent after 1905. Contemporary factual accounts show that by December 1905 he was sufficiently important locally to be invited to a Bolshevik Conference at Tammerfors, Finland, under the name K. Ivanovich. Apart from his exile to eastern Siberia, this was the first time Koba had left the Caucasus and it was an important occasion. He visited the Russian capital, St Petersburg, spoke in debates and chatted with other delegates and, most importantly, he met Lenin for the first time.
Significantly, he found Lenin’s informal manner disconcerting, as he expected a ‘great man’ to behave towards his followers with a certain ritual, for instance, to arrive late while the assembly waited with bated breath: ‘Then, just before the great man enters, the warning goes up: “Hush! Silence! He’s coming!” This rite did not seem to me superfluous because it creates an impression, inspires respect. . . . ’ This, however, was not Lenin’s style. ‘I will not conceal from you’, Stalin wrote, ‘that at that time this seemed to me to be rather a violation of certain essential rules.’1
On his return home, and stimulated by his experience at Tammerfors, Koba began writing articles in the local Georgian Bolshevik press. They were in the style that would become unmistakably Stalinist: dogmatic rather than argumentative, full of religious allusions, and organized mostly as questions and answers, like the Catechism at which he had excelled only a few years before. Usually commentaries on Lenin’s ideas, in particular they paraphrased Lenin’s obsession with centralized control of the party. Trotsky – occupying an independent position somewhere between Bolshevism and Menshevism – produced the pithiest and most prophetic comment on Lenin’s organizational idea, foreshadowing as early as 1904 the reality of Stalin’s exercise of power a quarter of a century later: ‘Lenin’s methods lead to this: the party organization at first substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organization; and finally a single “dictator” substitutes himself for the Central Committee.’2
In April 1906 Koba left the Caucasus again, this time for the ‘real abroad’. A party congress – the Fourth – was organized in Stockholm with the aim of reuniting all the groups and factions in order to mount a final onslaught on the regime. By this time, in fact, the government had largely recovered from the unrest of 1905. The new prime minister, Peter Stolypin, achieved early notoriety with his liberal use of the gallows – ‘Stolypin’s Necktie’ – and the political scene had altered radically, with the main opposition divided by the concession of a State Duma, or parliament, that was about to come into being.
Lenin’s line on tight central control was now accepted by the party, but he was opposed when he called for the nationalization of the land to be included in the party programme. Koba was among those who argued instead that the land should be confiscated and redistributed to the peasants, declaring that, as this was what they wanted, it would strengthen the party’s alliance with them. It was a policy the party would adopt in 1917.
Of greater importance at the time was the issue of party finances. As the revolutionary wave of 1905 declined and the liberals emerged as the party most committed to ballot-box politics, contributions from wealthy sympathizers on whom the revolutionaries had relied all but dried up. The mayhem of 1905, however, had created a mass of desperate men – strikers, unemployed, mutineers, deserters, escaped political prisoners and common criminals – many of them carrying stolen weapons. Some formed so-called fighting detachments to combat government repression, turning increasingly to criminal acts, such as robbing banks, in order to finance themselves. Unlike his Menshevik opponents, Lenin was not above exploiting these activities through his secret agents to fund the Bolsheviks. They were especially successful in the Caucasus, where Koba – the former seminary student – came into his own.
The party condemned these tactics, just as it condemned terrorist methods, though these too were widely practised. But at the Fourth Congress of 1906 Lenin insisted that ‘expropriations’ – ‘exes’ – of state funds were legitimate and that they should continue to be carried out under party supervision. At the Fifth Congress in May 1907 he maintained silence on this issue, but by now he had constructed his party-within-a-party and was keeping most of his business to himself.
The Bolshevik faction was guided by a secret Centre, within which a still more secret committee of three dealt with combat and financial affairs. Justifiably obsessed with security in a party that had endured repeated setbacks through police penetration, Lenin had a network of agents he could entrust with sensitive tasks who would in turn employ their own ‘trusties’. By dealing with only one or two such men at a time, and in watertight compartments, he reduced the risk of exposure to a minimum. That, at least, was the principle on which he operated.
The Caucasus, with its mountain ranges and ancient traditions of banditry and guerrilla fighting, was a favoured area for smuggling money, guns and explosives into Russia. And it was Koba and his small team of trusties who performed the greatest service. He took part in political assassinations and under his supervision bank robberies generated considerable funds for Lenin’s operations. It was probably in a road accident during one of these that Koba acquired the distinctive feature of a damaged arm.
The most spectacular robbery took place in June 1907 in Tiflis, when Koba’s gang staged a successful attack on a coach delivering nearly 350,000 roubles in 500 rouble notes to the State Bank. Bombs were thrown, people were killed and injured. The money was smuggled abroad to Lenin’s agents who had orders to exchange the notes simultaneously at banks in different cities. Unfortunately, one of Lenin’s most trusted agents was also a police spy, and every courier was arrested in the act.
Although the Tiflis ‘ex’ went into party history as a heroic episode, Stalin’s role in it was never highlighted, since it ran counter to party policy and had caused a scandal. Such actions tarred the party with the brush of criminality: this was meant to be a party of professional revolutionaries and organized workers, not a gang of bandits.
Koba returned to Baku and continued his activities among the oil workers. A booming new source of jobs, the Caucasian oil ports were a magnet to workers from all over the country. In particular, Baku was home to a wide range of ethnic groups and this, combined with the harshness of oil-field life for the workers, created an explosive mixture. Indeed, while it appeared that Stolypin had crushed the revolution throughout the empire, in Baku the Bolsheviks continued to operate as if the revolution was still to come, organizing strikes as well as terrorist acts.
Koba’s reputation in Lenin’s eyes rose even higher: here was a man who could not only produce money for the party, but who was also carrying on the political fight when others had laid down the sword. Also, Koba was now publishing his articles in the local Russian-language Bolshevik newspaper and ensuring that they reached Lenin abroad. Lenin was impressed, not by their intellectual content or originality, but by the zeal for the Bolshevik cause shown by their author. Koba had graduated from the provincial to the national level of politics.
An essential feature of the professional revolutionary’s pedigree was his penal record. In this regard Stalin excelled. Following the first arrest and his escape at the end of 1903, he was arrested again in 1908 and after several months in prison in Baku was deported again, this time to a small settlement called Solvychegodsk in northern Russia, arriving there in February 1909. He escaped after four months.
The Baku he found on his return eighteen months after his arrest was much changed. The Bolshevik and Menshevik organizations and the trade unions all had greatly reduced numbers and the party had no money. The Bolshevik newspaper had not been in circulation since he left and he set about reviving it. His first article criticized the leadership abroad for allowing dislocation between the centre and the periphery and for letting the old links wither. It was the classic complaint of a clandestine party worker.
In fact, the leadership itself had become weak, as Lenin’s intellectual entourage found reasons to desert him: often it was his dictatorial manner that drove them away, but there were also differences of principle, sometimes of an extremely abstruse kind which Koba, like most underground organizers, found tiresome. But Koba was no party rebel. He demonstrated his commitment to the Leninist approach by urging that the Central Committee should exercise greater authority.
However, in March 1910, while a general strike of the oil industry was being prepared, Koba was arrested yet again and in October sent back to complete his term in northern Russia. Life in Solvychegodsk was less harsh than Siberian exile would have been, and for Koba it was made even more endurable by a young peasant widow called Maria Kuzakova, with whom he lived and by whom he produced a son, Konstantin Kuzakov, who survived in Moscow into the 1990s.
Banned from the Caucasus and large Russian cities for five years, Koba chose to live in Vologda after his term was completed, a town that was conveniently located between Moscow and St Petersburg. As an experienced ‘illegal’, he thought little of police restrictions and in August 1911 soon made tracks for the capital.
His closest contact in St Petersburg was Sergei Alliluyev, a Bolshevik well known to Koba from their days in Baku. Indeed, in 1903, Koba had saved his friend’s two-year-old daughter, Nadezhda, from drowning when she fell into the sea. He would see her again when she was a teenage schoolgirl in 1917; she would become his secretary after the revolution and eventually his second wife. Alliluyev’s apartment was under police surveillance, however, and Koba was re-arrested within a few days and after several months in prison sent back to Vologda.
Among the Leaders
By now, Lenin had resolved to effect a final split from the Mensheviks and to reconstitute his faction as the party. Exasperated by successive splits and confronted by hesitation on the part of even his closest intellectual comrades, he decided that henceforth he would rely on the solid foundation of men with practical experience of the underground inside Russia and an attitude of unquestioning loyalty to himself. To this end, at a Bolshevik conference in Prague in January 1912, Lenin used his authority to have Koba co-opted – in absentia – on to his new Central Committee together with two other Caucasians. Lenin then formed a small Russian Bureau of the same men to manage the party’s affairs inside Russia.
This was a major turning point in Stalin’s life: he had been upgraded from a provincial agent to a potential equal of the most prominent figures in the movement. Lenin sent an emissary to Vologda to encourage Koba to escape. Most of the other members of the Central Committee inside Russia had been arrested and Lenin needed someone with energy to provide publicity and support for the Bolshevik election campaign for the Fourth Duma.
In February 1912 Koba escaped yet again, but after a flurry of journeys to the Caucasus and Moscow, he was re-arrested and deported in April 1912, this time to the harsher location of Narym in western Siberia. Two months later he escaped again and, travelling on the customary false passport, once again found his way back to St Petersburg. There he published articles on the election in Pravda and earned Lenin’s approval, even though eventually the Bolsheviks won only six seats. They had vacillated over whether to take part and their late entry had damaged their chances. The Mensheviks, equally hesitant, managed to secure only seven seats.
Considering his record, it was with surprising ease that Koba had escaped from Narym. Indeed, so many escapes raised suspicions that he may actually have been working for the secret police, doubts that have been ventilated at various times ever since. Such a feature in the portrait of so diabolical a figure has obvious appeal, and might even be used to explain the purges of the 1930s. In 1925, when Kamenev and Zinoviev broke with Stalin, they warned Trotsky that, if they were to die ‘accidentally’, Stalin would be the killer: ‘His hatred of us, especially of Kamenev,’ Zinoviev explained, ‘is motivated chiefly by the fact that we know too much about him.’3
But nothing to incriminate Stalin came out when tsarist police files were opened in March 1917, and allusions to Stalin’s possible involvement with the tsarist police that were made at various times after the revolution have not been substantiated by documentary proof. Nor does this approach explain the scale of the purge, which – as we shall see below – reached into sections of society entirely remote from the alleged events.
In November 1912 Koba left Russia to attend a Bolshevik gathering convened by Lenin in Cracow in Austrian Poland. Lenin was pressing for a final split with the Mensheviks. On the other hand, the Bolshevik deputies in the Duma and in Pravda, which Koba was now editing, wanted to avoid a public display of party disunity. This important difference with his leader placed Koba in a dilemma: he thought the Bolsheviks were too weak to follow Lenin’s line. His practical experience of party organization inside Russia also inclined him towards unity, rather than division. His discomfort was expressed in the letter to Kamenev, a comrade since Tiflis in 1904, cited in the opening lines of this book.
This important issue of tactics aside, Lenin found in his Georgian disciple a fascinating type of party worker he could rely on: intelligent, alert, with a record of audacious behaviour and knowledgeable about the life of national minorities in the ethnic salad bowl of the Caucasus.
The ‘national question’ had bedevilled Russian social democracy since the beginning of the century. It had led to a break with the Jewish and Polish Social Democrats, and one after another the revolutionary parties of the empire’s minorities were confronting the issue. The question they posed was two-fold: should the party be organized on ethnic lines and how would a future socialist state guarantee the workers’ national as well as class interests?
In principle, Marxists were disinterested in this question: ‘the proletariat knows no fatherland’. In practice, however, they conceded that nations must have the right of self-determination – though they would not campaign for it – whether or not this implied the break-up of multinational empires. Difficulty arose where there were groups that did not have an ‘organic’ affinity with a particular territory, or where the local population was mixed. In the Russian empire this meant the Jews, but also most of the borderlands where migration had created complex communities, such as in Poland, southern Russia – today’s Ukraine – the Baltic provinces and the Caucasus. Local movements were advocating national–cultural autonomy, that is, freedom for national groups to retain their cultural institutions and traditions in religion, education and all forms of self-expression. The Mensheviks had moderated their position and espoused the cultural autonomy for which the Jewish Social Democrats had long campaigned.
Koba was sensitive to this issue. In 1907, in his report on the London Congress, published in Baku, he had pointed out that the majority of the Menshevik delegates had been Jews, followed by Georgians and then Russians, while the majority of Bolsheviks had been Russians, followed by Jews and then Georgians. He noted that one of the Bolsheviks had remarked – presumably in jest – that the Mensheviks were a Jewish faction and the Bolsheviks a genuine Russian faction, and that ‘it wouldn’t be a bad idea for us Bolsheviks to arrange a pogrom in the party’.4
In January 1913 the Georgian Dzhugashvili began writing under a new pseudonym, ‘Stalin’ (man of steel), a name that was not only Russian in origin but in form an obvious emulation of ‘Lenin’. He was now not merely an editor of the party newspaper, but was consorting with intellectuals and even the Leader himself. He was still Koba to his comrades, but he felt it was time for him to shed his provincial and ethnic identity as a writer. Lenin proposed that he should write an article on the national question, and in mid-January 1913 sent him to Vienna on party business and to do some local research. The cosmopolitan European capital would, it was supposed, provide the proper atmosphere.
In Vienna Stalin met Trotsky who, after Lenin’s death in 1924, would personify everything Stalin came to see as resistance to his rise to ultimate power. In 1913 Lenin and Trotsky were engaged in a savage slanging match, augmented by Stalin in Pravda. But on personality grounds alone Stalin and Trotsky were never likely to take to each other. Stalin was still the taciturn provincial, not yet fully fluent in Russian, with a limited knowledge of the German he had studied in prison and largely ignorant of European culture. He was shabby and unimpressive in appearance, short, pockmarked from a smallpox epidemic in 1887, with eyes universally described as yellow and glinting like a tiger’s. He was not comfortable in the relatively sophisticated milieu of émigré life.
Trotsky was a complete contrast. Born Lev Bronstein in 1879, he too came from an uncultured background, but he was a natural-born intellectual who in his teens escaped both the countryside and his Jewish roots to move among the revolutionary intelligentsia. By the age of twenty-three he was regarded as an independent-minded figure who could hold his own among the established party leadership. No less important than his remarkable intellect, he had a striking personality. Tall and handsome, dramatic in style with his glittering pince-nez, a brilliant speaker in Russian and German and on good terms with some of the leading personalities in Viennese political life, he was the consummate cosmopolitan. He was also arrogant, truculent and above all contemptuous of the men – like Stalin – who were doing Lenin’s bidding.
In contrast to his relations with Trotsky, in Vienna Stalin also met Nikolai Bukharin, a brilliant Bolshevik intellectual and a man noted for his affability. It was easy to become friends with him, and in due course the two men would also become political allies. In 1938 Stalin would have him shot as an agent of British and Japanese intelligence.
Stalin’s article, ‘Marxism and the National Question’, was his first foray into theory and it gave him great satisfaction. Not only did it please Lenin who described it as the work of a ‘wonderful Georgian’, but it also gave its author a valid pass into the world of the party intelligentsia. Using his considerable knowledge of the practicalities of the national question, Stalin fleshed out Lenin’s position. This was that, although nationality was inseparable from territory, national independence and self-expression were not high on the revolutionary agenda. That place was reserved for the unity of the working classes of all nations. Even if a nation’s working class sought independence, it would only be a transitional phase leading to their eventual unification with the workers of the world in the world revolution.
By mid-February 1913 Stalin was back in St Petersburg where he continued as an editor of Pravda, as a party contact with the Bolshevik deputies in the Duma, and as a militant advocate of the Leninist cause. He had especially close relations with Roman Malinovsky, the spokesman of the Bolshevik faction in the Duma. Malinovsky had been a powerful workers’ leader in Moscow with the gift of revolutionary rhetoric, and in 1912 Lenin was sufficiently impressed at their very first meeting to put him on the Central Committee. What neither Lenin nor Stalin knew was that Malinovsky had been a police spy since 1909 and that the Okhrana had been instrumental in clearing his path to become a Duma deputy.
The revolutionary parties had been penetrated by police spies and agents provocateurs from their beginning. Malinovsky’s task was to ensure that the Social Democratic factions remained divided by maintaining a hard line in the Duma. Rumours about his true role were spreading, however, but Lenin believed that his enemies were merely trying to discredit the Bolsheviks. He had staked his Duma tactics on Malinovsky and would hear nothing said against him.
Malinovsky, however, had his own agenda, and on 8/21 March 1913 he organized Stalin’s arrest. With his record Stalin could expect no mercy. He was sentenced to four years in the region of Turukhansk in central Siberia on the Arctic Circle, arriving there in August. Such a harsh sentence may be taken as evidence that he was not, after all, a police agent.
Even Stalin’s will to escape was broken by the sheer bleakness of the place and the heightened surveillance that was applied with the outbreak of war in 1914. Despite the fact that by the summer of 1915 there were eighteen other Bolsheviks to share his miseries with, he spent many days lying on his bunk with his face to the wall. He served almost his full term in various settlements, returning to civilization only in March 1917 after the fall of Tsar Nicholas. Much later he would establish one of the many slave-camp complexes of his Gulag here.