When their train arrived at nearby Kutaisi, Stalin held everyone back: “Let Natasha go in front so everyone can see that women also fight these dogs!”{115}
At Kutaisi, the authorities tried to force the prisoners to behave. The politicals were split up, but Stalin soon found a way to communicate and plan a counterattack. When Natasha Kirtava was moved out of the collective cell into solitary, “Emotion overcame me. I started crying.” Stalin heard about this on the prison telegraph and had a note delivered to her that read: “What do your tears signify, she-eagle? Is it possible prison has defeated you?”
In the prison yard, Stalin met a moderate comrade, Grigol Uratadze, who hated him but almost admired his “glacial temperament: in six months, I never once saw him crying, angry or indignant—he always conducted himself with total composure” and his “smile was carefully calibrated to his emotions… We used to chat in the courtyard.” But Stalin just “walked alone in strange little short steps… Everyone knew how surly he was,” but he was also “absolutely imperturbable.”
Stalin was hostile to the bumptious intellectuals, but, with the less elevated worker-revolutionaries, who did not arouse his inferiority complex, he played the teacher—the Priest. Soso “organized the reading of newspapers, books and magazines, and gave lectures to the prisoners.” Meanwhile he confronted Kutaisi’s more severe regime. The regional governor refused his demands. On 28 July, Soso gave a sign and the prisoners started a noisy protest, banging the steel doors so loudly that the whole town was alarmed. The governor called for troops, who surrounded the prison, but then he capitulated, agreeing to place all the politicals in one cell. Stalin won, but the governor got his revenge: it was the dreariest dungeon in the bowels of the jail.
When some of the prisoners were swiftly despatched to Siberian exile, Stalin suggested a group photograph. Just as he liked to set up the group photographs when he was in power, so now he directed everyone’s position and placed himself in his favourite place—middle top row: “I’m also one of the soldiers of the Revolution so I’ll stand here in the centre.” There he is: long-haired and bearded, the self-appointed leader.
When his comrades were led out for their long journey, “Comrade Soso stood in the courtyard and raised a red flag… We sang the Marseillaise.”{116}
The secret police now mislaid Stalin… in their own prison. The Gendarmes and the Okhrana in Tiflis both thought that “Chopura, the Pockmarked One,” had long since been released. Captain Lavrov believed he was again leading the workers in Batumi “under special surveillance.” Clearly the spooks were watching completely the wrong man. Batumi was not too sure either until Lieutenant Colonel Shabelsky settled the case of the lost Pockmarked One by informing everyone that “Djugashvili has been in prison for a whole year already (now in Kutaisi).”{117}
The grinding mechanisms of Tsarist justice, which sent cases like that of Stalin from local governors to Justice and Interior Ministries in Petersburg, generated a recommendation for three years’ exile in eastern Siberia.[53] On 7 July 1903, the Justice Minister sent this recommendation to the Emperor, who approved Stalin’s sentence with his Imperial stamp. Nicholas II was such a punctilious if unimaginative autocrat that he diligently read even the most trivial paper sent to his office. So there were several occasions when the fate of the future Red Tsar crossed the desk of the last Emperor.
Now the police managed to lose Stalin all over again. The governor of Tiflis thought he was in the Metekhi Fortress, but the prison replied that he had never been there. So the head of the Tiflis police declared: “Location of Djugashvili so far unknown.” The police appealed to the Gendarmes, who revealed that Stalin was back in Batumi Prison, which was well and good—except that he was still in Kutaisi Prison. It took a month and a half to find him: such confusion has fuelled the feverish imagination of conspiracy-theorists ever since. Were the Gendarmes or the Okhrana hiding him from one another because he was a doubleagent? There is no evidence for this. The muddle might be suspicious if it applied only to Stalin, but it was almost universal. In the interlinked worlds of murderous conspiracy and sluggish pen-pushing, there was as much confusion as konspiratsia.
While he waited, he heard terrible news. On 17 August 1903, Soso’s hero, Lado Ketskhoveli, who had been arrested in Baku and incarcerated in the Metekhi Fortress, was standing at his cell-window baiting the guards with shouts of “Down with Autocracy!” when one of them shot him through the heart. Such a fate could easily have befallen Stalin himself. He never forgot Lado.
On 8 October, Stalin finally learned that he was departing on a very long journey. His first stop would be a return to Batumi. He organized another group photograph. As he departed the prison, his comrades waved the flag, singing “The Marseillaise.”
“I’m being exiled,” Stalin wrote to the newly released Natasha Kirtava. “Meet me near the prison.” She raised ten roubles and some food to help him on the cold journey into the Russian winter, but he left wearing just a light Georgian chokha, boots and no gloves. As he was marched onto the prison steamship in Batumi Harbour for the first leg of his journey via Novorossiisk and Rostov, the beautiful Natasha waited on the wharf: “I saw him off.”
This voyage would take a Georgian, accustomed to the singsong, wine-flavoured lushness of Georgia, to another life in a frozen far-off country: Siberia.{118}
12. The Frozen Georgian: Siberian Exile
The journey to Siberia was often more deadly than the exile itself. Stalin experienced the full gamut of horrors of the dreaded etap, the slow stage-by-stage progress to the east, picking up other prisoners on the way. Stalin claimed that his ankles were sometimes shackled to iron balls and once said emotionally: “There’s no better feeling than straightening your back after wearing shackles.”
When he reached Rostov-on-Don, he was already out of money and telegraphed Batumi to ask for more. Kandelaki sent it. Somewhere not far out, he started to suffer agonizing toothache and consulted a doctor’s assistant. “I’ll give you medicine that’ll cure your tooth for ever,” he promised. “He put the medicine into my rotten tooth himself,” Stalin recalled. “It was arsenic but he never told me you had to take it out of the tooth. So it stopped aching all right but a couple of teeth fell out altogether. He was right—those teeth never ached!” Toothache was just another of the many ailments that tormented Stalin throughout his life.
The farther from civilization they travelled, the more the prisoners were exposed to the extremes of Siberia, disease and violence. Somewhere in Siberia, one of the prisoners “was almost dying of gangrene,” Stalin recounted in his seventies. The closest hospital was 1,000 kilometres away at least. The doctor’s assistant was found and he decided to amputate. He poured spirit on the leg; asked several men to hold him down and started to operate. I couldn’t bear to watch the operation and I sheltered in the barracks, but the man’s bone was sawn without anaesthetic so you couldn’t escape his screams. I can still clearly hear that scream!” En route, he also encountered scores of Gurian peasant-workers, arrested during his Batumi demonstration. Soso admitted a rare moment’s guilt seeing these bewildered Georgians shivering on the road to Siberia—but they assured him of their gratitude.
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The Tsarist authorities recognized, due to the special challenges of evidence and secrecy, that terrorists and revolutionaries could not be tried by jury or judge: the local Gendarme officer recommended a sentence to the local governor-general who forwarded it on to the Special Commission—five Justice and Interior officials who passed sentence. The Interior Minister confirmed it; the Emperor signed off. Stalin was habitually sentenced this way. Between 1881 and 1904, only 11,879 were sentenced like this, while during Stalin’s reign of the same approximate timespan, he presided over the deportation of an astonishing 28 million, several million of whom never returned. As for capital punishment under the Tsars, Catholic Poles and Jews in the western provinces were much more likely to be hanged than Orthodox Russians or Georgians.