Iremashvili wrote his memoir years after fleeing from Soviet Georgia; he can hardly have remembered Joseph’s exact words in the churchyard. He had also become Stalin’s personal and political enemy and wanted to sell as many copies of his book as he could. Did he perhaps embroider the truth? In other memoirs about the period before 1917 a different Joseph Dzhughashvili is depicted: introverted, secretive, taciturn and unemotional.10 Yet even if Iremashvili exaggerated or invented a little, he should not be dismissed. He had known Dzhughashvili since early childhood and knew all about the emotional side of his personality. They had been seminarists together when Dzhughashvili was writing poems in a romantic vein. Moreover, they were Georgians attending an Orthodox funeral and Joseph Dzhughashvili acted conventionally in showing family and friends how deeply he mourned his wife.
Dzhughashvili’s reported comment is anyway a clichéd one which indicates a widower more concerned with himself than with Ketevan or his son. He had not even bothered to live with her throughout the last months of her illness. That Joseph was shaken by her death, though, is beyond dispute. What is less plausible is that this single event was the decisive one in turning him into a man seeking murderous revenge on humanity in general. There were many such events in his long life. His friends and associates noted how each event made him harsher in his dealings with the world. Iremashvili stated that even before Ketevan’s death it was obvious that Joseph acted with contempt towards everyone except his mother, wife and son.11 Her passing left him with his young son Yakob. Yet he did not let bereavement get in the way of political activity. Having chosen the life of a full-time revolutionary, he was not going to let parenthood burden him. Total personal freedom was required for this, and he asked his in-laws, the Svanidzes, to take Yakob off his hands. Ketevan had three sisters and a brother. To Joseph’s relief, these relatives were happy to foster the lad. They also stood by Joseph when he ran out of money.12
He must have compared himself ruefully with émigré Bolsheviks in their little colonies in Switzerland and France. Most leading emigrants could live off private incomes. They could visit libraries, write letters to each other and go on holidays without worrying whether the Okhrana was tailing them. (The police agents in their midst did not much alter the daily habits of the émigrés even though everyone knew they existed.) They had time to write and opportunities to publish. They could meet foreign revolutionaries. They did not need to grub out a life while being constantly on the run. They were not threatened by prison or Siberian exile.
Apart from his comrades, Dzhughashvili was alone in the world. He saw nothing of his mother who was still in Gori. His father had long passed out of contact. Not that this stopped Joseph thinking about him. In one of his early articles he offered the following account:13
Let’s take a simple example. Just imagine a cobbler who had a tiny workshop but could not survive the competition with larger bosses and closed his workshop and perhaps went off to work in the shoe factory belonging to Adelkhanov in Tiflis. He entered employment with Adelkhanov not to become a permanent hired labourer but rather in order to save some money, put aside a little capital and reopen his workshop. As you see, that cobbler already has a proletarian condition but his consciousness is not yet proletarian: it is thoroughly petit-bourgeois.
These details are so near to the pattern of his father’s life that Joseph must surely have been describing him. Beso’s fate was an unhappy one. After splitting from Keke and Joseph he had gone on working and drinking in Tbilisi, and Joseph later claimed that he was stabbed to death in a tavern brawl in 1909.14
If Joseph mourned him, he left no sign of it; indeed it is not even known how quickly he learned of Beso’s death. Dzhughashvili’s focus in this period was on evading arrest. He was adept at the techniques. But his recurrent success at foiling the police again led to the rumour that he had a dubious association with the Imperial authorities. Was he an employee of the Okhrana? The Menshevik Isidore Ramishvili in 1905 had accused him of being ‘a government agent, spy and provocateur’.15 Such unsubstantiated tales were repeated down the years. There has even been an allegation that the Okhrana file on him was passed around the party in the 1920s and that Stalin instigated the Great Terror in the late 1930s mainly in order to eliminate those who had been initiated into knowledge of his employment.16 In fact the most exigent analysis of the evidence gives no serious grounds for thinking that Dzhughashvili was a police agent. This does not mean that he failed to exploit whatever links he had with the Okhrana. He was arrested and interrogated many times. It is easily credible that he let drop information which would incriminate the enemies of his faction or even his rivals inside the faction. There were recurrent queries in particular about Stepan Shaumyan’s arrest and apparently some fellow Bolsheviks sought to call Dzhughashvili before a party tribunal. Arrest and exile spared Dzhughashvili this fate.17 Shaumyan was the other towering figure of Bolshevism in the south Caucasus; it would have been in character for the ambitious Dzhughashvili to get him out of the way.
Yet the Okhrana preferred to keep its main informers out of prison; and Dzhughashvili, although he sometimes received light sentences, was incarcerated or exiled too frequently and lengthily to have been a police employee. He was to spend the Great War through to the February 1917 Revolution in Siberia even though the state authorities could have used him productively if he really had been working for them.
Clandestine political activity was complex and demanding, and Dzhughashvili’s leading position required that he kept a wide range of acquaintances and sources of information. Comrades were among these; they were indispensable if a solid revolutionary core was going to be maintained. But he also had to seek information on a wider plain. Inhabiting working-class areas where informers were many and where imprisonment was a constant danger, a revolutionary leader had to live on his wits — and Dzhughashvili was remarkable for his number of contacts. The Georgian Menshevik Artëm Gio left an account of the rounding up of Marxist militants in Tbilisi. Bursting into a friend’s flat, Dzhughashvili was astonished to find Gio waiting for him there. ‘I just wasn’t expecting it,’ he exclaimed: ‘How has it happened? Haven’t you been arrested?’18 Gio was explaining how he had evaded the fate of others, when in walked a stranger. Dzhughashvili reassured Gio: ‘You can talk freely and boldly… He’s a comrade of mine.’ The newcomer turned out to be a Georgian who worked as a police interpreter. He had rushed over to tell Dzhughashvili the latest news: several close comrades (including Dzhughashvili’s future father-in-law Sergei Alliluev) had been taken into custody. In fact a detachment had already been assigned to arrest Dzhughashvili in the evening. The interpreter, however, was disconcerted by Gio’s presence and, once he had passed on his information, he ran off.19
This was an obscure but significant episode in Dzhughashvili’s career. It showed that he got up to pretty unorthodox business; for his interpreter was not a Marxist militant but — in Dzhughashvili’s words — ‘a great nationalist’.20 The interpreter so hated Russian Imperial rule that he willingly helped other opponents of tsarism: he deliberately mistranslated words so as to save Georgian militants from trouble. Gio’s memoir was an unusual one. Bolsheviks were conventionally depicted as having nothing to do with the police, and it cannot be discounted that his book was published in 1925 in Leningrad only because Stalin’s factional adversary Zinoviev controlled the press in that city and wanted to besmirch his reputation. Yet the making of revolution in the Russian Empire required multifarious talents and a flexible moral code. Dzhughashvili possessed the qualifications.