With this in mind Stalin in the second half of January 1913 travelled on to Vienna, where he could use libraries with fuller holdings in Marxist literature than were available in Kraków. He stayed for a few weeks with fellow Bolsheviks on the southern edge of the city, not far from the palace of Schönbrunn, in a first-floor flat on the Schönbrunnerschlosss-trasse. Stalin’s comrades had got lots of books ready for him. He was given a desk and a divan.26 (Stalin never objected to sleeping on the simplest frames.)27 For several weeks he read in Viennese libraries and wrote up his work in the flat. He frequently consulted local comrades about the German-language texts of Bauer, Kautsky and the Marxist journal Die Neue Zeit.28 Stalin was a man on a mission. He lived the national question and expatiated about it even on social occasions. Six-year-old Galina, the daughter of his Bolshevik hosts, got thoroughly bored on their walks in Vienna’s well-kept parks: ‘You’re not talking about the nation again!’29 Stalin, cut off from his son Yakob in Georgia, took to Galina as he did to other lively children. She was his match: she did not believe him when, with his heavy accent, he teasingly promised to bring her some ‘green chocolate’ from the Caucasus.30
He took extensive notes and wrote up most of the text of his booklet before returning to Russia. Initially he published ‘The National Question and Social-Democracy’ in the St Petersburg Marxist journal Prosveshchenie (‘Enlightenment’).31 Back in the capital in mid-February 1913, Stalin resumed his part in the complex game played between the revolutionary parties and the Okhrana. The police had long ago accepted that a policy of total suppression of the revolutionary movement would not work, and indeed they had acted on this awareness since the 1880s. (The problem was that the Okhrana could change the rules of the game at will, and the result could be prison or exile for individual revolutionaries.) Stalin had to take the usual risks. This time he stayed not in the less savoury districts of the capital but in the centre, at 44 Shpalernaya Street, in the rented apartment of the Bolshevik Duma deputies F. Samoilov and Alexander Badaev.32 The Okhrana was aware that Stalin was carrying out instructions of the émigré leadership in Kraków — or at least that he was doing so to the degree that he wished. Stalin realised that the Okhrana knew who he was and what he was up to. The Okhrana hoped to get clues about wider circles of Bolshevik activity; Stalin aimed to give no clues while continuing to guide the Duma faction towards the desired end.
Evidently his presence in St Petersburg was no secret. At any time he could be arrested. With Lenin’s blessing, he was directing the faction’s activity in the capital. He could hardly, however, strut about. He had to be wary. The fact of his voluntary obscurity in 1912–13 led many to go on supposing that he was a nonentity among Bolsheviks before the Great War. Such an idea was seriously awry. He had risen to the summit of the Central Committee and saw his talents as lying in the work he could do in the Russian Empire.
The inevitable happened on 23 February 1913. Stalin went to a ball for International Women’s Day at the Kalashnikov Exchange. It was a big occasion and many militants were heading for the same destination. The Okhrana, however, had decided that the time had come to arrest him. Apparently Malinovski had tipped off his controllers about Stalin’s whereabouts that day, and he was grabbed and handcuffed on arrival. He had finished his lengthy article on ‘The National Question and Social-Democracy’ (which was later republished as Marxism and the National Question) and delivered it to the offices of Prosveshchenie in the capital.33 This was a legally published Marxist journal that carried items of doctrinal theory and contemporary analysis. The fact that its editors welcomed his article was a signal of his rising importance among Marxists of the Russian Empire. The piece was thought sufficiently impressive to be turned out as a booklet. Stalin had also left behind an article, much briefer, for Pravda.34 This was a report on ‘The Situation in the Social-Democratic Group in the Duma’. Its contents justified the harsh line taken by the Bolsheviks in comparison with the Mensheviks. Stalin himself was out of action in the capital’s House of Preliminary Detention.
He was not to know that he would not taste freedom’s delights again for exactly four years; for it was to be precisely on International Women’s Day in 1917 that female textile workers went on strike in the capital and forged the first link in a chain that pulled down the Imperial monarchy some days later. No further works by Stalin were printed between his arrest and Nicholas II’s abdication. Scarcely had he penetrated the central precincts of the Bolshevik faction when he was cast to the winds of tsarist justice. He had known the risks. Recurrent arrest and exile were the norm for the revolutionaries who did not emigrate. He must have hoped that he would be sent again to somewhere like Solvychegodsk or Narym and that the Central Committee would enable him to escape and resume his important political functions. He would not be put on trial. His immediate future depended on the police. Stalin awaited the decision with his customary fortitude.
9. KOBA AND BOLSHEVISM
Dzhughashvili was by no means an outstanding thinker. This would not raise an eyebrow if his followers had not gone on to laud him as a figure of universal intellectual significance. He always had plenty of detractors. Most of the early ones were persons who — at least by implication — suggested that they themselves were thinkers of distinction. They deluded themselves. Scarcely any leading figure in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party made an original intellectual contribution. Plekhanov, Lenin and Trotski were brilliant synthesisers of the ideas of others — and not all of those others were Marxists. Each took his personal synthesis to an idiosyncratic extreme. This was also true of Bukharin, who tried his hardest to effect a deepening of the Marxist perspective in the light of contemporary philosophy, sociology and economics. Only Bogdanov can be categorised as an original thinker. Bogdanov’s amalgam of Marx and Engels with the epistemology of Ernst Mach led him to reject economic determinism in favour of a dynamic interplay of objective and subjective factors in social ‘science’. He made a serious contribution through his work on the importance of ideas for the control of societies by their elites across the course of human history. Bogdanov’s Empiriomonism was a tour de force.1
Yet the other leading figures succeeded in persuading their comrades that they too were of exceptional cultural significance. Stalin before the Great War made no such claim for himself. Nor in subsequent years did he suggest that he had made an original contribution. He always claimed to have been merely a loyal Leninist.2 He called himself a praktik, meaning that he was more a practical revolutionary than a theoretician. When he published ‘Anarchism or Socialism’ in 1906–7, many readers thought he could hardly have been the authentic author. His school friend Davrishevi assumed that another Bolshevik, perhaps Dzhughash-vili’s comrade Suren Spandaryan, had written it. But Spandaryan put Davrishevi right. It really was Stalin’s article.3 ‘Anarchism or Socialism’ was not a coruscating work. Stalin privately admitted this after the Second World War (when his comment was treated as extraordinarily modest).4 It was nevertheless a work of practical importance at the time of publication. This has been overlooked by his biographers, who have ignored the fact that anarchists were active in Tbilisi after the turn of the century. Georgia was recognised as a place where a fundamental challenge to the Imperial monarchy would take place. émigré anarchist leaders had sent propagandists on missions to Tbilisi. Stalin flung himself on the available literature on Marxism before writing his urgent reply.5