It was nevertheless a dangerous game. Another of Dzhughashvili’s contacts was a certain Kornev. Dzhughashvili gave the code words to be used by Gio when meeting Kornev. Yet Kornev seemed shifty to Gio, who thought to himself: ‘Either he’s an Okhrana agent or a great coward!’21 Although he was working in a tailor’s workshop, Kornev obviously had no experience of cutting and sewing. Everything about him was suspicious. From this it was a small step to conclude that ‘in his hands was the thread by which he [thought] to infiltrate our organisations’.22 Gio made his excuses and went into hiding; his instincts told him that Dzhughashvili’s trusted contact was a police spy and that Dzhughashvili himself had been fooled. This may have been the case. Another possibility is that Dzhughashvili was more willing than most revolutionaries to take risks with the lives of his comrades. Egotistical and calculating, he judged situations in terms of his self-interest. People mattered to him only in so far as he could use them for the good of the cause or for his own political advancement and private comfort and pleasure. His recklessness in clandestine revolutionary work was of a piece with the other manifestations of his personality.
If Dzhughashvili’s relationship with the police retains some mystery, there need no longer be any doubt about another murky aspect of his activities. Before the Great War the accusation was made that he was involved in organising armed robberies and that he continued this activity even after the Fifth Party Congress banned it. The evidence for this remained shaky for a long time. Dzhughashvili, though, never expressly denied having participated in this criminal activity. For years he simply discouraged public interest in the matter; and when he mounted to supreme power, he suppressed all mention of it.
His duties in Georgia on behalf of Bolshevism stretched far beyond purely political activity. He was also involved in the organisation of ‘exes’. This was the party abbreviation for expropriations or, more directly, robberies. During the 1905–6 Revolution there were many Marxist groups across the Russian Empire involved in attempts to fund the party by thefts from banks. The Bolsheviks were among them, and Georgia was a centre for their efforts. There were good reasons for this. Banditry was common in the mountains and popular opinion was very far from regarding it as contemptible. The tradition of the abrek, who stole and murdered while cocking a snook at official authority and distributing some of his ill-gotten gains to the local poor, remained strong. (This was at the core of the novel by Alexander Qazbegi, The Patricide, which the young Joseph Dzhughashvili had so much admired.) Bolsheviks in Georgia saw themselves as canalising such customs towards a similarly altruistic purpose: the seizure of the profits of capitalism for the benefit of a party dedicated to the cause of the people. The recent Party Congress had firmly banned the organisation of exes. But the Bolshevik Centre continued to demand that they should be undertaken. Lenin and his comrades needed the money.
Dzhughashvili was the man in charge of the Georgian Bolshevik operations and the practitioner was the Armenian Semën Ter-Petrosyan who masqueraded under the pseudonym Kamo.23 Dzhughashvili and his friend from school Joseph Davrishevi led rival groups of political robbers from houses on Mount David in Tbilisi. The police knew what was happening. One of the protégés of Joseph Davrishevi’s father Gori gendarme chief Damian Davrishevi, a certain Davydov, was in charge of policing the area. Wanting a peaceful life, Davydov asked Joseph Davrishevi to avoid making trouble on his pitch — and Davrishevi assumed that a similar approach had been made to Dzhughashvili. Davrishevi was able and daring and, although he belonged to the Social-Federalists (who were socialists but also anti-Marxists and overt nationalists), Dzhughashvili tried to get him to cross over to the Bolsheviks. Davrishevi refused. (Georgia’s Bolsheviks of course had suspected Dzhughashvili of being attracted to Georgian nationalism. Was his appeal to Davrishevi yet another piece of evidence for them?) Dzhughashvili and his fellow Bolsheviks at any rate took no notice of Davydov’s request. Incidents recurred on Mount David. The two groups went on raising their respective party finance by persuasion, fraud, extortion and armed robbery. Owners of businesses were easily intimidated. Even the entrepreneurial family of the Zubalovs, who had constructed the building that later became the Spiritual Seminary, made financial subventions to Davrishevi.24 Dzhughashvili kept quiet about the names of his providers. Yet it is not unlikely that the Zubalovs, one of whose dachas in the Moscow countryside he was to occupy with his second wife from 1919, yielded to Bolshevik demands in the period of revolutionary upsurge.
They pulled off their greatest coup on Erevan Square almost within sight of the Spiritual Seminary in Tbilisi on 12 June 1907. Kamo arrived in the disguise of an Imperial general in a comfortable horse-drawn carriage. They knew that a large quantity of banknotes was about to be delivered by stagecoach. Bombs were thrown at the guards. Kamo and his accomplices picked up linen bags with a quarter of a million rubles inside, and Kamo himself drove his coach away at full speed, taking advantage of the chaotic, bloody scene. He brought the proceeds of the robbery to the Bolshevik Centre base in Kuokkala in Finland. Lenin was delighted.
Dzhughashvili had taken a brief trip to Berlin shortly beforehand25 — probably this involved some consultation with the Bolshevik leadership abroad. Afterwards Lenin, Dzhughashvili and Kamo wished to keep everything about the robbery strictly secret. Dzhughashvili and Kamo felt especially vulnerable since several Marxists in Tbilisi knew who had been organising the robberies. The Mensheviks, still outweighing the Bolsheviks in Georgia, set about their enquiries in November 1907. Silva Dzhibladze was put in charge of the commission set up to try the suspected participants. Dzhibladze himself had a less than saintly past; he had been expelled from the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary for a physical assault on the Rector.26 But he drew the line at breaking party policy. Dzhughashvili was identified beyond all reasonable doubt as the éminence grise behind the Erevan Square affair.27 By then, though, Dzhughashvili was nowhere to be found. Worried about being sought by the police or being asked to account for himself to the Mensheviks, he had fled into hiding in Baku.28 Mensheviks were to claim that he was expelled from the party.29 What is clear is that the Bolsheviks, having made so much money from the robberies, ceased this criminal activity and that Dzhughashvili became ever more prominent in the politics of Bolshevism in the south Caucasus. He and Kamo remained friends and saw each other often during and after 1917. They justifiably felt they had carried out Lenin’s instructions with great diligence.
Dzhughashvili made it his task to harry Menshevism in the south Caucasus. This factional strife mattered as much to him as the organising of revolutionary activity among the Baku workers and the oversight of the expropriations. His zeal and intelligence had brought him to the forefront of Bolshevism in the region. In Georgia he was ‘famous as the second Lenin’.30 He regularly derided the pride taken by Mensheviks in their successes with the Georgian peasantry in 1905–6. Thus he declared that class struggle was better organised in Baku on the Caspian coast with its great concentration of working-class inhabitants. While Zhordania and the Mensheviks directed their energy at activity among Georgians in Georgia, Dzhughashvili moved among Russians, Armenians and Azeris as well as people of his own nationality. He had genuine chutzpah, even claiming that the Mensheviks in Tbilisi were reluctant to take on the Bolsheviks in debate. This was unfair: Zhordania was always willing to accept any such challenge. But Dzhughashvili was not trying to be fair. He wanted to discredit Menshevism and would use any material that lay to hand. Generally he accused Zhordania of an obsession with legal activity which was tantamount to a policy of closing down the clandestine party network.31