Comrade Koba [Stalin] told you that we were against you and demanded your sacking from the Committee [wrote the Menshevik Noe Khomeriki] but I promise nothing of the sort happened and everything Koba told you is a malicious lie! Yes: a calumny to discredit us! I just wonder at the man’s impudence. I know how worthless he is, but I didn’t expect such “courage.” But it turns out he’ll use any means if the ends justify them. The end in this case—the ambition—is to present himself as a great man before the nation. But… God didn’t grant him the right gifts so he had to resort to intrigues, lies and other “bagatelles.” Such a filthy person wanted to pollute our sacred mission with sewage!
Stalin claimed he had the right to sack whomever he wanted from the Committee, even though he knew this was untrue. Khomeriki called him “Quixote Koba”—but, as so often, Stalin’s shameless “impudence” won the day.[61]
Triumphant at winning control for Lenin, in September 1904 Stalin now wrote two letters to his Gori chum Davitashvili, in Leipzig, praising Lenin the “mountain eagle,” attacking the Mensheviks and boasting that his “committee had been hesitating but I convinced them.” Plekhanov, he wrote, “has either gone off his nut or is showing hatred and hostility,” while Jordania was an “ass.” This obscure Georgian was quite happy to denounce the international sages of Marxism. The letter worked: Lenin heard about Stalin for the first time. The “mountain eagle” acclaimed him as his “fiery Colchian.”[62]
On New Year’s Eve 1904, Soso ordered a small gang of railway workers to meet him outside the Nobleman’s Club on Tiflis’s Golovinsky Prospect. Noble liberals were then holding a so-called Banquet Campaign to canvass the Tsar for a constitution, but the Bolsheviks loathed such half-baked bourgeois liberalism. As soon as the chairman opened the banquet, Stalin, backed by his workers, burst in and demanded to speak. When the banqueters refused, Stalin sabotaged the evening by shouting, “Down with Autocracy,” then led his workers out singing “The Marseillaise” and “The Warsawianka.” On 2 January, the Tsar’s chief Far Eastern port, Port Arthur, still stocked with troops and munitions, surrendered to the Japanese. So began 1905.{134}
On Sunday, 9 January, when Stalin was in Baku again, the revolutionary-cum-police-agent Father Gapon marched at the head of 150,000 hymn-singing workers to submit a Humble and Loyal Petition to the Tsar at the Winter Palace in Petersburg. Cossacks blocked the way. They fired two warning salvoes, but the workers continued to advance. The troops fired on the crowd, and then charged. Two hundred workers were killed, and hundreds more wounded. “There is no God any longer,” murmured Father Gapon. “There is no Tsar.”
Bloody Sunday shook the Empire, unleashing a tempest of demonstrations, ethnic massacres, killings and open revolution. Strikes mushroomed across the Empire. Peasants burned the palaces and libraries of their masters—3,000 manor houses were destroyed. The unrest spread to the army. “The Tsar’s battalions,” wrote Stalin in an article, “are dwindling, the Tsar’s navy is perishing and now Port Arthur has shamefully surrendered—the senile decreptitude of the Autocracy is revealed again.” But the Tsar still hoped for a miracle. In one of the most extraordinary naval ventures in history, he sent his leaky Baltic Fleet to almost circumnavigate the globe, via Africa, India, Singapore, to fight the Japanese. Had the gamble succeeded, Nicholas II’s victory would have resounded down the ages.
The Tsar sacked his luckless Interior Minister and appointed a new one, who suggested that some political concessions might be necessary. “One would think you’re afraid a revolution will break out,” replied the Emperor.
“Your Majesty, the revolution has already begun”—the 1905 Revolution, which Trotsky later called the “Dress Rehearsal.” At the time, it seemed like the real thing, a savage and exhilarating battle across the Empire, but especially in the Caucasus, where Stalin learned the methods that he would use throughout his life.{135} He found himself in his element, revelling in the bloodcurdling drama.
“WORKERS OF THE CAUCACUS! TIME FOR VENGEANCE!” he wrote. “They’re asking us to forget the swish of the whips, the whiz of the bullets, the hundreds of our hero-comrades killed, and the hover of their glorious ghosts around us whispering: ‘AVENGE US!’”{136}
14. 1905: King of the Mountain
Nineteen-hundred-and-five began and ended with slaughter. It was the year of revolution in which young Stalin, for the first time, commanded armed men, tasted power, and embraced terror and gangsterism. On 6 February, he was in Baku when some Armenians shot a Tartar in the centre of the city. Azeri Turks—or “Tartars” as they were often called—retaliated. The news spread. The authorities, who had long resented Armenian wealth and success, encouraged the Muslim Azeri mobs to pour into the city.
For five long days, Azeri gangs killed every Armenian they could find, with the frenzied hatred that comes from religious tension, economic jealousy and neighbourly proximity. While anti-Semitic pogroms broke out across the Empire, Baku descended into an orgy of ethnic killing, burning, raping, shooting and throat-cutting. The governor, Prince Nakashidze, and his police chief did nothing. Cossacks handed over Orthodox Armenians to be slaughtered by Azeri mobs, armed by the police. One Armenian oil baron was besieged in his palace by an Azeri mob, whom he picked off with a Winchester rifle until he ran out of ammunition and was torn to pieces. Eventually, the Armenians, wealthier and better armed, started to fight back and massacre Azeris.
“They don’t even know why they’re killing each other,” said the mayor. “Thousands of dead lay in the streets,” wrote a witness of the Baku slaughters, “and covered the Christian and Mussulman cemeteries. The odour of corpses stifled us. Everywhere women with mad eyes sought their children, and husbands were moving heaps of rotting flesh.” At least 2,000 died.
Stalin was there to see these infernal and apocalyptic sights. He had formed a small Bolshevik Battle Squad in Baku. Now he gathered this mainly Muslim gang and ordered them to divide the two communities wherever possible while simultaneously taking the opportunity to steal any useful printing equipment—and raise money for the Party by protection-rackets. Stalin, according to his first biographer, Essad Bey,[63] who grew up in Baku, “presented himself to the head of the [Armenian] household and gravely informed him that the time was near when the household would fall beneath the knives of the Muslims,” but “after a donation to Bolshevik funds, Stalin conveyed the Armenian merchants to the countryside.”{137}
Afterwards Soso hurried back to Tiflis, where there was every danger of an ethnic bloodbath between Georgians and Armenians or Christians and Muslims. The city was paralysed by strikes; the police arrested revolutionaries and Cossacks charged demonstrators on Golovinsky Prospect.
Stalin helped organize a demonstration of reconciliation to prevent a massacre and wrote a passionate pamphlet which, printed and distributed by Kamo, warned that the Tsar was using “pogroms against Jews and Armenians” to “buttress his despicable throne on the blood, the innocent blood of honest citizens, the groans of dying Armenians and Tartars.”
61
Noe Khomeriki later served as Minister of Land in the independent Georgia of 1918–21 before leading the Menshevik rebellion of 1924 when he was captured and shot. His letter was confiscated in a Gendarme raid and then long lost in the archives. It is unusual because it is so specifically damning in its analysis of Stalin’s methods and ambitions. In late 1950, Beria, then the Politburo grandee in charge of the nuclear project, was out of favour and feared his own destruction. We now know that he heard about this letter from Georgian circles and, gathering ammunition to use against Stalin if need be, he secretly and unofficially asked an archivist to trace it. But Beria did not find it. The letter resurfaced only in 1989.
63
Essad Bey was one of the pseudonyms of Lev Nussimbaum, the son of a Jewish Baku oil baron, who wrote