The criminals were a real hazard. Usually they “respected our struggle,” said Stalin’s henchman Vyacheslav Molotov, who made a similar trip to Irkutsk, but they also terrorized the politicals. “During that etap,” Stalin told one of his adopted sons, “it was my fate to come up against a psychotic safe-breaker, a giant of a man, almost two metres tall. I made some harmless remark to him about my tobacco pouch… The exchange ended in a fight. The idiot forced me to the ground, breaking several ribs. No one helped me.” Stalin was knocked unconscious, but typically drew a political lesson: “As I was coming round, it occurred to me that politicians must always win over allies.” In future, the psychopaths would be on his side.{119}
On arrival in Irkutsk, the distant capital of Siberia, Stalin was despatched westwards to a regional centre, Balagansk, seventy-five versts from the nearest railway station. Now they travelled by foot and cart: Stalin was absurdly underdressed for the Siberian freeze, still in his white Georgian chokha with its bullet pouches. He found seven exiles in Balagansk and stayed with Abram Gusinsky, a Jewish exile, trying to avoid being sent farther.{120} But he had been assigned to Novaya Uda. The local police recorded that “Josef Djugashvili, exiled by His Imperial Majesty’s command of 9 July, arrived on 26 November and was taken under police supervision.”
Novaya Uda, 70 versts from Balagansk and 120 from the closest station, thousands of versts from Moscow or Tiflis and his farthest exile, was a tiny town divided into two halves: the poor lived in shacks on a marshy promontory while the marginally better-off lived around a couple of shops, a church and a wooden fortress built to terrify into submission the local shamanistic Mongol tribe, the Buryats. There was little to do in Novaya Uda except read, argue, drink, fornicate and drink more—these were pastimes for locals and exiles alike. The settlement boasted five taverns.
Soso took to all these local pastimes, but he found his fellow exiles intolerable. There were three others in Novaya Uda, Jewish intellectuals who were either Bundists (followers of the Jewish Socialist Party) or SDs. Stalin had met few Jews in the Caucasus but henceforth he encountered many of the Jews who had embraced Marxism as a means of escaping the repression and prejudice of the Tsarist regime.
Stalin opted for the poor part of town, staying in “the beggarly ramshackle two-room house of a peasant, Martha Litvintseva.” One room was a larder where the food was kept, the other, divided by a wooden partition, was the bedroom where the whole family lived and slept around a stove. Stalin slept on a trestle table in the larder on the other side of the partition: “At night, he lit a small lamp and read when the Litvintsevs were asleep.”{121}
Siberian exile was regarded as one of the most terrible abuses of Tsarist tyranny. It was certainly boring and depressing, but once settled in some godforsaken village, the exiles, intellectuals who were often hereditary noblemen, were usually well treated. Such paternalistic sojourns more resembled dull reading-holidays than the living hell of Stalin’s murderous Gulags. The exiles even received pocket-money from the Tsar—twelve roubles for a nobleman such as Lenin, eleven roubles for a school graduate such as Molotov, and eight for a peasant such as Stalin—with which to pay for clothes, food and rent. If they received too much money from home, they lost their allowance.
Wealthier revolutionaries could travel first-class. Lenin, who enjoyed a private income, financed his own trip to exile and behaved throughout like a nobleman on an eccentric naturalist’s holiday. Trotsky, who was subsidized by his father, a rich farmer, mused pompously that Siberia was a “test of our civic sensibilities” where the exiles could live happily “like gods on Olympus.” But there was a big gap between the well-off like Lenin and the penniless like Stalin.[54]
The behaviour of exiles was governed by a set of rules. Each settlement elected a committee which could try anyone who broke Party rules. Books must be shared. If an exile died, his library was split between the survivors. No consorting with criminals. On departure, the exile was allowed to choose a gift from each fellow exile and should present a keepsake to his host family. Exiles divided the housework and the duty of collecting the mail. The arrival of the post was their happiest moment. “You remember how good it felt in exile to receive a letter from a friend?” recalled Yenukidze when he was in power.
Yet in the Wild East rules were hard to maintain: sexual adventures among the exiles were rife. “Like palms on a Diego Rivera landscape, love struggled towards the sun from under the heaviest boulders,” declaimed Trotsky grandiloquently, “couples came together… in exile.” When Golda Gorbman, who later married Stalin’s lieutenant Klimenti Voroshilov, was in exile, she was seduced and impregnated by Yenukidze, the Georgian who was later one of Stalin’s magnates. In power, the Politburo liked to reminisce about these scandals. Stalin himself never forgot the cheek of the exile Lezhnev, who bedded the local Prosecutor’s lovely wife and was sent to the Arctic as punishment. Molotov quoted the story of the two exiles who fought a duel for a mistress—one was killed and the other got the girl.
Exiles had to rent rooms from local peasants: they found themselves living in cramped and noisy little rooms, irritated by screaming children and lack of privacy. “The worst thing [about exile] was the lack of separation from the hosts,” wrote Yakov Sverdlov, later in exile with Stalin, but this sharing of rooms led also to more sexual temptation. Local custom banned affairs with exiles. But this was impossible to enforce: the local girls found the exiles exotic, educated, affluent and hard to resist—especially when they were often sharing the same bedroom.
Revolutionaries were naturally fractious, but their feuds in the isolation of exile had a malice all of their own. “Men bared themselves before you and showed themselves in their pettiness—there was no room to show decent features.” The exiles behaved appallingly, but Stalin’s conduct as reckless seducer, procreator of illegitimate children, serial feuder and compulsive troublemaker was one of the worst. No sooner had he arrived than Stalin started to break the rules.{122}
He cut his Jewish fellow exiles but embraced the local hobby: pubcrawls with the criminals. “There were some nice salt-of-the-earth fellows among them and too many rats among the politicals,” he told Khrushchev and the rest of the Politburo at their dinners in the 1940s. “I hung around mostly with the criminals. We’d stop at the saloons in town, see if any of us had a rouble then we’d hold it up to the window, and drink up every kopeck we had. One day I’d pay, next day someone else.” This consorting with criminals was considered beneath the dignity of the snobbish middle-class revolutionaries. “Once they organized a comrade’s court,” says Stalin, “and put me on trial for the offence of drinking with criminals.” This was neither the first nor the last trial that the uncongenial Soso faced from his comrades.{123}
Yet he did not lose contact with the outside world or settle for a long stay. In December 1903, the mail brought a letter from Lenin. “I first met Lenin in 1903,” said Stalin, “not a personal meeting, more a postal one. It wasn’t a long letter but a bold and fearless critique of our Party.” He exaggerated. This was not a personal letter—Lenin had not yet heard of Stalin—but a pamphlet: “A Letter to a Comrade on Organizational Tasks.” Nonetheless its effect on Stalin was real enough. “That simple bold note reinforced my belief that in Lenin, the Party had a mountain eagle.”
Stalin burned it afterwards but he soon learned that at the SD Party’s Second Congress, held in both Brussels and London, Lenin and Martov had defeated their rivals the Jewish Bundists, who wanted to combine socialism with national territories for minorities. But then the victors had fallen out among themselves, Lenin demanding his exclusive sect of revolutionaries, Martov embracing a wider membership and mass worker participation. Lenin, who revelled in schismatic confrontations, split the Party, claiming that his group were the Majoritarians—Bolsheviki—and Martov’s the Minoritarians—Mensheviki.[55]
54
When Lenin arrived, he reprimanded the stationmaster, availed himself of the local merchant’s library, brought out his wife, Nadya Krupskaya, and his mother-in-law to care for him, and even employed a maid to clean the house. The Lenins patronized the peasants who, noted Krupskaya, “were generally clean in their habits.” Lenin raved about the landscape of this “Siberian Italy,” a pleasant environment for writing. “Generally,” wrote Krupskaya, “exile didn’t pass by so badly.” The system favoured noblemen and Orthodox Russians and Georgians over Jews and Poles. Lenin and his friend Yuli Martov were arrested at the same time on the same charges but, while the noble Russian Lenin enjoyed his scenic reading-holiday, his fellow SD leader, the Jewish Martov, struggled to survive the desperate Arctic freeze of Turukhansk.
55
Even at this early date, Lenin and Stalin, soi-disant champions of the proletariat, were against the involvement of real workers. They believed in an oligarchy that would rule in the name of the workers, a concept that became the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Stalin was convinced that the election of workers to the Party committees would include too many amateur revolutionaries and more police agents. Leninists were also less sympathetic to the land aspirations of peasants. Most Georgian Social-Democrats believed in wide worker and peasant participation and land grants to peasants, so they became Mensheviks. The Georgian Mensheviks under firebrands like Jordania were very effective and increasingly popular; Georgian Mensheviks were much more violent than Russian Mensheviks. Jibladze and Noe Ramishvili were as enthusiastic about terror and expropriation as Stalin up to 1907. But ultimately Bolsheviks were much more disciplined, merciless and comfortable with terror and killing. To complicate matters, there were mild Bolsheviks such as Kamenev, just as there were extreme Mensheviks.