The Allies Read online

  The conference hurriedly disbanded in a shambles, and Stalin caught the next train to Tiflis, where an army lieutenant general named F. F. Griaznov (nicknamed the “Butcher of Tiflis,” “General Shithead,” etc.) was wreaking havoc on anyone remotely associated with the revolt. Many innocents were swept up in the Cossacks’ dragnet as they marched through the city and into the countryside, burning, shooting, hanging, lancing, and sabering the terrified citizens. The same was happening in Baku and other Georgian towns and cities. Anything resembling rebellion was crushed. This time the czar meant business. But by now the country was in chaos and on the verge of civil war.

  Stalin threw himself into the fray with unabated fervor. As angry mobs marched through the streets he was seen atop a coach denouncing the czar’s concessions of a constitution and Duma for the Russian people, branding them “a negation of the people’s revolution.” He pressed Marxists to revolt. “Smash this trap and wage a ruthless struggle against liberal enemies of the people,” he urged, meaning the Mensheviks and anybody else who would accept the czar’s compromises. Concessions, Stalin believed all of his life, were a sign of weakness. If the people only pushed harder, the government would collapse and socialism would prevail.

  But the people did not push harder, and the revolution of 1905 collapsed in a bloodbath of Cossack repressions. Tens of thousands were killed. Thousands were executed and thousands more were imprisoned or exiled to Siberia. For his part, Trotsky dismissed it as a mere “dress rehearsal,” like great theater.16

  Stalin now went back underground with his gang and continued robbing and extorting. By now he had grown his famous black mustache as well as a scruffy beard. And he had taken to wearing a Caucasian overcoat (for “from the Caucasus”) and beat-up black hat, which earned him the sobriquet the “Man in Black”—or simply, to friends and foes alike, the “Caucasian.” Stalin was not a tall man, but he was very thin; with his pockmarked face, large ears, and piercing hazel eyes he held a frightening aura for some. He spoke little and acted shifty, as though he was hiding a knife or a gun.

  He also redoubled his intrigues against the Mensheviks, setting a pattern of behavior he would employ for the rest of his long and violent career. He wrote scathing letters to the party leadership about specific members, accusing them of misdeeds that were demonstrably untrue. It was the old divide-and-conquer strategy, coupled with an utter paranoia that they were employing the same methods against him.

  Stalin now concocted a plan to assassinate General Griaznov. Working with the hated Mensheviks, a joint crew of revolutionaries dressed as workmen were painting railings around the viceroy’s palace when the general’s heavily guarded carriage emerged from the gates. As it passed, they dropped their tools and produced bombs, which they tossed into the general’s lap, blowing him into half a dozen pieces.17

  Despite an earlier quasi-agreement at the Fourth Socialist Congress in Stockholm that the bank robberies should be banned because they were giving Socialism a bad name (there was no FDIC or equivalent so the people simply lost their savings), the holdups continued unabated in Georgia, thanks to Stalin and his like-minded gang. The Mensheviks had outvoted the Bolsheviks on this one, but Lenin looked the other way because he needed the money. Stalin’s gang—now known as the Outfit—apparently even indulged in piracy by hijacking a mail steamer on the Black Sea that was delivering workers’ payroll from port to port.

  * * *

  THEN TRAGEDY STRUCK Stalin’s young family. Kato, alone and miserable all day with their baby and frightened that Stalin would be arrested as he carried out his revolutionary activities, took ill. She began losing weight. Stalin paid little attention at first, and was generally away from early morning to late at night. The heat of the Baku oil fields and a meager diet made things worse. Her family back in Tiflis got word that Kato was sick and wrote her husband, asking him to bring her home. But Stalin dallied, and by the time he got her there it was too late.

  Kato’s illness has been variously diagnosed as stomach cancer, typhus, or tuberculosis. But in any case, on December 5, 1907—just seventeen months after their marriage—she died in intense pain, hemorrhaging blood and simply wasting away. She was twenty-two. Stalin got back just in time for her death. He was devastated, attested to by a photograph taken of him looking down into her casket. She might have died anyway, but his failure to seek treatment after she became seriously ill was abhorrent. Stalin was almost always absent: to a dedicated party man, the party always comes first. Kato’s family took in baby Yakov while Stalin returned to Baku to resume his revolutionary activities.

  * * *

  AMONG THE DUTIES that kept young Stalin away from his wife and son was the Fifth Socialist Congress in London, which met in the summer of 1907. There Stalin first met Trotsky, who would become his most bitter enemy. Stalin, the young terrorist and committed Bolshevik, loathed the well-known Menshevik at first sight, and Trotsky returned the favor. Each man thought himself the savior of the party’s future, and even at this early date they were already on a collision course. Everybody with Marxist views was there—Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Social Democrats, Social Revolutionaries, and the like. Trotsky was said to have arrived “in a blaze of glory, eclipsing even the god Lenin.” That alone was enough to warrant Stalin’s ire, let alone the fact that he was Jewish. (Stalin had recently written in reference to the Jewish-dominated Menshevik party that it “would not be a bad idea” for the Bolsheviks to organize a pogrom—or massacre—to deal with them.)

  To many, Trotsky was a great hero. He had previously been convicted of sedition and exiled for life to Siberia. In 1902 he escaped, traveling hundreds of miles on a hastily crafted reindeer sled, acquiring a brave reputation and his new surname in the process. Now, like Lenin, Trotsky would have to live in European exile until the revolution arrived. A return to Russia at this point would mean death.18

  The Mensheviks renewed their calls to disband Stalin’s terrorist-like battle squads. But the Bolsheviks, Lenin included, would have none of it. Lenin formed his own secret party-within-a-party to keep the robbery money coming in. Worse, many of the leaders of these squads became common criminals who kept most, if not all, of the loot and disported themselves dishonorably.

  Stalin, of course, was not among this cohort and kept up his work organizing robberies and assassinations. But in 1908 he was arrested for revolutionary activities and banished for a mere three years to the dismal Siberian town Solvychegodsk, which contained some two thousand residents and five hundred exiled Socialists. They spent their days and nights as before: reading, arguing, drinking, fornicating, and drinking more—all at government expense.

  In June 1909, Stalin escaped again and returned to Georgia, where he remained at large until March 1910, when he was once more rearrested and eventually sent back to Solvychegodsk to serve out his three-year sentence in exile. He stayed at the house of an attractive young widow, Maria Kuzakova, with whom he fathered a son, Konstantin, who grew up to be a prominent producer and executive in Soviet television. When Stalin later came to power, Maria was moved to a nice apartment in Moscow. And although he never knew his father, during the years of rampant repression and executions Konstantin appealed to Stalin to spare his life. In his file there is a protective note: “Not to be touched—Stalin.”

  His exile officially ended, Stalin, who was not permitted to live in St. Petersburg or any large city, chose the town of Vologda in the northwest of Russia, from which he promptly departed for St. Petersburg under a false passport. Three days later he was again arrested by police, who had been watching him, and returned for another three years’ exile, once more in Vologda.

  After the failure of the 1905 uprising, the squabbling factions within the Socialist umbrella agreed to stop arguing and work together to produce another, more productive revolt. Lenin publicly assented to this, but privately he had no intention of keeping his word. In 1912 he carried off a brazen coup, declaring that the Bols
hevik wing would be the sole representative of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. This faction would be led by an all-powerful, all-Bolshevik central committee on which Lenin, personally, reserved a place for Stalin to serve.

  In February 1912 Stalin again escaped Vologda for St. Petersburg, where on Lenin’s orders he was charged with making certain that as many Bolshevik delegates as possible were elected to the new Duma. This brought Stalin in contact with Vyacheslav Molotov, the sinister up-and-coming Soviet foreign minister during Stalin’s reign, and the namesake for the infamous gasoline-fueled “cocktail” that became so popular in the revolution of 1917. The two men campaigned for a Bolshevik victory.

  This venture did not last long, however. Knowing that arrests usually came after dark, Stalin did not return to his room to sleep but spent his time in all-night bars and cafés, which nearly wore him out. But soon the police caught him yet again, and this time he was banished to the forbidding snowbound Narym region of Siberia, littered with swamps and dense forests. It was autumn, and Stalin contrived to escape before the harsh winter set in. He did so, and even without legitimate credentials he managed to reach Cracow, Poland, for a meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee and a visit with his mentor Vladimir Lenin, who had begun to call him the “Wonderful Georgian.” Afterward, Stalin repaired to Vienna where, in postal conversations with Lenin, they refined the sort of studied cruelty that would be necessary to make the next revolution, as well as its aftermath, successful.

  Lenin had sent Stalin specifically to Vienna to write a lengthy paper studying the definition of nationhood among the peoples of Europe, a subject that had been troubling him. This opus, filled with fifty-odd pages of mostly double-talk that Stalin himself referred to as “rubbish,” was published in the St. Petersburg Prosveshcheniye, the Socialist Party’s sociological journal. Nevertheless, the publication sent Stalin’s stock in the party soaring. It was believed that he had developed an ability to identify, analyze, and clarify complex issues unique to the establishment of Marxist socialism, which was undergoing constant iterations as its adherents tried to refine and reflect on the philosophy of the world’s greatest thinker.

  It was during this period that Stalin became Stalin, by name and reputation. Stalin inveighed against the Jewish Bund (union), which was trying to establish a Jewish national identity, as well as the dangers that presented to a Socialist revolt, for many Mensheviks were Jews. He signed his position paper Marxism and the National Question. For the first time, Stalin—meaning “man of steel”—was using his name to political effect (much in the fashion of Molotov, which translates to “man who smites with hammer,” but who was born Vyacheslav Skryabin). These two men changed their names as they sought to change the world.

  An ulterior motive of Lenin’s for sending Stalin to Vienna has been suggested by the historian Frederic Morton in his splendid Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913–1914. Morton speculates that Lenin viewed Stalin as a kind of “diamond in the rough,” a Georgian yahoo who needed a “finishing school” in the persons of the wealthy and sophisticated Alexander and Elena Troyanovsky (who, while stationed near the top of Viennese society, were also prominent party members in good standing because they, too, had done some time in Siberia).

  Stalin stayed with the Troyanovskys more than a month but the diamond in the rough refused to be polished; perhaps he was simply unpolishable. He had arrived in Vienna right at the beginning of carnival, Vienna’s gayest social season, which occupies the month before Lent, in a third-class train carriage wearing crude peasant boots, a coarse overcoat, and carrying a peasant’s rough wooden suitcase. Stalin partook in none of the festivities, shunning the nightly parties and dinners, including the annual labor union ball and one at the local insane asylum known as the Lunatics Ball.19

  He tramped the seediest streets in Vienna, drinking tea and researching his scholarly paper on nationalism. It was there that he had a face-to-face encounter with his soon-to-be archrival Trotsky, who was sitting in a tearoom in conversation with a comrade “when suddenly,” Trotsky recalled afterward, “without knocking at the door, there entered from another room a man of middle height, haggard, with a swarthy grayish face showing marks of smallpox. The stranger, as if surprised by my presence, stopped at the door and gave a guttural grunt which might have been taken for a greeting, went to the samovar and filled his glass with tea, and went out without saying a word.”20

  At length, when Stalin had finished his mission in Vienna, the “city’s charm and the Troyanovskys’ chic” notwithstanding, he boarded a third-class railcar with his essay tucked away in his wooden suitcase. He chugged out of Vienna “a grim virtuoso wearing the mask of a clod.”21

  * * *

  IN THE SPRING OF 1913, the czar’s police and courts caught Stalin at a “charity” concert that was actually a fund-raiser for the party; he had attempted to escape wearing a woman’s dress and wig but the police were not deceived. Stalin was clearly a dangerous revolutionary, and this time the government was not fooling around. A czarist court sentenced him to four years’ exile in a tiny godforsaken village in Siberia’s Arctic Circle. Here, the temperature in winter could reach 100 degrees below zero. The short summers were plagued by swarms of bugs, and a dull constant sun shined twenty-four hours a day, like a bare lightbulb in a prison cell. The flat, featureless landscape remained snow-covered as far as the eye could see, and suicide was not uncommon among the inmates. Stalin had used up all his money and therefore could not buy proper winter clothes, food, vodka, or other essentials. He took to writing begging letters to friends, including the Alliluyev family, into which he would marry in the not too distant future. Escape, if not impossible, was extremely dangerous, so the Man of Steel settled down to wait out the sentence of his exile and occupied his days (and, in the summers, nights) by ice fishing for his dinner. A nonconformist as usual, Stalin got into trouble with his hutmates because whenever it was his turn to do the dishes he simply put them on the floor and let the dog lick them clean. After some weeks of this he was forced to live in another hut.22

  Meantime, the Great War of 1914 had sucked Russia into its vortex, and the Motherland was on the verge of defeat two years later when somebody realized that thousands of Siberian political prisoners might be more useful as soldiers. Among these was thirty-seven-year-old Joseph Stalin, who was sledded, floated, trucked, and railroaded out of Siberia to the nearest army induction station. Here, he was pronounced unfit for duty, due to an arm that had been withered in a childhood accident and a limp he incurred when Lenin had tried to show him how to ride a bicycle.

  Better still, rather than return him to Arctic hell, the kindly authorities concluded that Stalin could serve the remainder of his sentence in the town of Achinsk, from which good judgment told him not to escape—at least not while the First World War was still going on. He wrote to a friend: “I swear to you on the life of my dog that I will serve out my term. At one point I thought about leaving, but now I’ve abandoned that idea and abandoned it for good.” In any event, it was there that the revolution found him.23

  During this period Lenin and the Bolsheviks had not been idle. In fact, the entire Bolshevik deputation in the Duma had been put under arrest for opposing the war. Lenin had watched these events unfold from his places of exile in Switzerland and Germany.

  In February 1917 a revolution broke out in the czar’s capital of St. Petersburg, sparked by the revolt of the local army garrison, which didn’t wish to be herded into the trenches to be slaughtered at the hands of the ferocious Germans. After setting fire to their own barracks buildings, the soldiers burned down the police stations and other seats of power and declared solidarity with the Bolsheviks. This touched off an astonishing wave of sympathy at almost every level of society, save the so-called royal class.

  The czar abdicated and was later arrested and sent with his family beyond the Urals, never to return. A provisional government was formed by the Duma in
hopes of keeping some kind of democracy in place. Red flags and ribbons sprang up everywhere until the entire city was engulfed in a sea of red. Delirious Russian throngs marched the streets, arm in arm and singing the French revolutionary anthem “La Marseillaise,” which they had adopted because the czar had forbidden any Russian revolutionary music whatsoever.

  When news of these terrific events reached Stalin in the burg of Achinsk, he caught the St. Petersburg–bound Trans-Siberian Express and made his way to the home of his friend Sergei Alliluyev, a former railway worker and professional party agitator who had sent Stalin money while in exile. Agitators were inciting crowds, and people daily marched in the streets shouting slogans. But Stalin chose not to be a part of those activities. Instead he threw him self into writing editorials in Pravda, the official party newspaper; at night, he told hair-raising stories of his experiences at the North Pole to Alliluyev’s daughters, including teenage Nadezhda (or Nadya), a high school student who listened to these adventures with rapt attention. Stalin would also read to them from the great Russian writers—Chekhov, Pushkin, Gorky—while smoking a pipe, giving off the impression that he was truly a man of the world.24

  This was a time of great uncertainty and confusion in Russia. Much of the chaos was inspired by the German enemy, which had financed Socialist revolutionary foment in hopes of knocking Russia out of the war. Elements of the Russian army and navy were in open revolt over the dreadful conditions at the front; a recent offensive in Galicia had cost the Russians nearly half a million soldiers. The provisional government and Duma were attempting to keep order, with mixed results. Soldiers and sailors were killing their officers and desertion was rampant. There were cries everywhere of “Stop the war!” In St. Petersburg, the Mensheviks and several other Socialist groups organized the Petrograd Soviet, which became very powerful very quickly, hauling before it members of the former czar’s administration for trial and punishment.