The workers were impressed with the “intellectual,” whom they dubbed “the Priest.” He gave them a reading list. “He once left us a book,” said Kuridze. “‘It’s Gogol,’ Stalin explained, teaching us about Gogol’s life.”
Comrade Soso, usually dressed in a dashing Circassian coat with his trademark black wide-brimmed fedora and a white Caucasian hood tossed over his shoulder, quickly gained an aggressive following, known as the “Sosoists,” an early version of Stalinists. Chkheidze and the “legals” of the Sunday school invited him over to receive a reprimand, but he refused to go. “They’re armchair strategists and avoid real political struggle,” sneered Soso, who had to be in absolute control. “Djugashvili’s despotism,” reported Captain Lavrov of the Tiflis Gendarmerie, “alienated many” in the struggle “between the older Socialists and the younger Socialists.” The strike spread. Blacklegs were threatened, their horses slaughtered. But the secret police were after Soso the Priest. The Cossacks were massing.{100}
General Smagin, governor of Kutaisi Province, which included Batumi, rushed into town to lead the suppression of the strike. Addressing the workers, his message was bleak: “Back to work or Siberia!” Overnight on 7 March, Smagin arrested Stalin’s bodyguard Porfiro Lomdzharia and the strike leaders.
Next day, Stalin arranged demonstrations outside the police station where the prisoners were kept. The pressure worked. The Gendarmes nervously moved the prisoners to a transit prison. The governor promised to meet the demonstrators. This did not suit Soso. At that night’s meeting, he proposed storming the prison. Vadachkoria preferred to negotiate. “You’ll never be a revolutionary,” sneered Soso the Priest. The Sosoists backed him. The next morning, Stalin led aggressive demonstrations. The day after that, much of the town joined him on the march to storm the prison. But a traitor had betrayed the plan. Cossacks took up positions. Troops under the tough Captain Antadze blocked the way to the transit prison. They fixed bayonets. The vast crowd hesitated before the roadblock.
“Don’t run or they’ll shoot,” Stalin warned.
“Soso suggested we sing songs. We didn’t know the revolutionary hymns then so we sang ‘Ali-Pasha’!” said Porfiro Kuridze.
“The soldiers won’t fire,” Stalin called out over the crowd, “and don’t be afraid of the officers. Beat ’em up and let’s free our comrades.” The mob lurched forward towards the prison.
Soso was surrounded by a guard of Sosoists, mainly Gurian peasant-workers, led by Kandelaki. “The Gurians were brave conspirators. They tried to stop me going to the front but I did,” Stalin bragged later. “So they created seven circles round me and even the wounded were held in place so it was impossible to break the circle.”
Just as the crowd outside the jail started to charge the soldiers, the prisoners inside overcame their guards. One of the prisoners, Porfiro Lomdzharia, heard the rioters: “We tried to get out. The gate was shattered. Some prisoners escaped.” The Cossacks galloped at the marauding demonstrators, who tried to grab their rifles. The rebels fired shots in return and pelted the Cossacks with rocks. The soldiers beat them back with rifle-butts but were forced to retreat. Captain Antadze was hit by stones, his cuff pierced by a bullet. The soldiers fought back, shooting into the air—and retreated again. But this time they stood their ground. “Again the loud voice of Stalin called upon us not to disperse and to free the workers,” recalled a demonstrator, Injerabian. The mob surged forward.
“Then a terrible sound!” Captain Antadze barked the order “Fire!” Volleys of shots rang out. People fell to the ground. Everyone was running and screaming. “It was panic, absolute hell. The deserted square was covered with dead and dying, groaning” under the eyes of the soldiers. The dying cried out “Water” or “Help!” Then “I remembered Soso,” says Kandelaki. “We got separated. I was afraid, starting to search for his body among the dead.” But Vera Lomdzharia, Porfiro’s sister, noticed Stalin wandering around observing the mayhem he had unleashed. Looking for her brother among the corpses, she attacked a soldier, but he replied: “It was Antadze.”
Soso picked up “one of the wounded” and got him into a phaeton. “He brought him to our flat,” reports Illarion Darakhvelidze. “Soso wrapped bandages around the wounded,” agrees Kandelaki. Natasha Kirtava and other women helped wounded comrades into carts that took them to hospital. There were thirteen dead, fifty-four wounded. That night at Darakhvelidze’s house, “We were extremely agitated.” But Soso was exhilarated.
“Today we advanced several years!” Stalin told Kachik Kazarian. Nothing else mattered. “We lost comrades but we won.” As in many other bloody campaigns, the human cost was irrelevant, subordinate to its political value. “The whiplash and sabre render us a great service, hastening to revolutionize any innocent bystanders.” Young Trotsky was impressed by the Batumi massacre: “It stirred the whole country.”
Jordania and Chkheidze fumed about “this youngster who wanted to be a leader” but “lacked necessary understanding of affairs… and used rough language.” They believed that the massacre played into the hands of the authorities: was Stalin an agent provocateur?
Stalin rushed to his printing-press hidden in the cottage of Despina Shapatava, a young Marxist. “Thank the mothers who raised such sons!” he boomed in his printed response to the massacre, distributed all over town by next morning. However, an informer betrayed the press, and policemen raided the house. But Despina blocked the way. “My children are sleeping,” she shouted. The police laughed: neither the press nor Stalin were interrupted. But he was not only fighting with words: it seems that he ordered the assassination of the Rothschilds’ manager von Stein. “We entrusted [a comrade] to assassinate him,” recalls one of Stalin’s henchmen. “When von Stein’s carriage got closer,” the hit man drew his revolver but bungled the hit. “Von Stein turned his carriage round, fled and left the town that night by ship.”
The hunt was on for Stalin, who now had to move his invaluable press to a safer hideout. He “attached great importance to conspiracy,” says Kuridze. “Often he’d arrive in a coach, then change his clothes and disappear again just as quickly.” He would alter his appearance, suddenly swap coats with comrades, often sporting “a hood over his long hair.”{101}
That night, Stalin loaded the press onto a carriage, hid it in the cemetery, then carried it to a shack, the home of an old Abkhazian highwayman named Hashimi Smirba, at Makhmudia, seven versts outside Batumi but right under the cannons of the garrison fortress (and therefore beyond suspicion). The retired brigand was delighted to hide the press because his friend Lomdzharia told him it would print counterfeit roubles. Smirba would get his share. Smirba’s son Hamdi, whose memoirs do not appear in the cult literature, recounts how Stalin arrived in the middle of the night with four heavy boxes and sprang into action, unpacking and setting them up in a cellar. The typesetters, and probably Stalin too, arrived and left dressed as Muslim women in veils. Working day and night, he hired builders to construct another house for Smirba containing a secret compartment for the whirring press.
“What’s that noise?” asked one of the builders.
“A cow with a worm in its horn,” replied Smirba.
Soso almost moved into Smirba’s wooden cottage, where the old Muslim footpad hassled the young Georgian rebel for his share of the scam.