Stalin insisted on taking the priest for a drink in the local tavern.
“They’ll inform you in advance when I’m coming,” he said before disappearing. “Father, do not be late: I want to make the journey there and back in a day. We’re both young men.”
Soon the priest got the word. Stalin returned with two henchmen who helped him load the donkeys with saddlebags containing money, printing-presses and probably ammunition. Stalin knew the trains to Chiatura were often searched, and had concluded that this was the safest way to reach his “Bolshevik fortress.”
The priest and the ex-seminarist, precisely the same age, chatted as they trekked. Sometimes under a tree, Stalin rested his head on the priest’s knee for a nap. During Stalin’s dictatorship, Father Gachechiladze wished he had murdered his companion, but at the time “he impressed everyone. I even liked him—he was restrained, serious and decent. He even used to recite poetry to me,” adding that they were his own compositions. He was still proud to be a poet.
“Some of my poems were even published in the newspapers,” boasted Stalin, who rarely talked politics but claimed that “the police are after me because a friend of mine got into a fight in Chiatura over a girl—and I oversupported him.” He displayed his stiff arm as evidence of this fight (yet another of his versions). Stalin recited the blessing before meals. “You see, I still remember it,” he laughed. He sang as they walked. “Music has such power to relax the soul!” he reflected.
A peasant invited priest and revolutionary to a feast. The tipsy Stalin sang “with such velvet softness” that the peasants wanted to “marry him to their daughter.”
The priest complimented him: “You’d have made a great priest.”
“I the cobbler’s son competed with noble children and I was superior to all of them,” replied Stalin.
When they arrived in Chiatura, Stalin disappeared with the saddlebags into the bazaar and returned with them empty: “Now at least I can rest my head on them on the train home,” said Stalin.
This was Stalin’s secret life in the revolutionary summer of 1905—an armed chieftain leading packhorses laden with saddlebags of smuggled guns and plundered banknotes over the baking hills to Chiatura.{150}
In Tiflis, the Cossacks and the terrorists fought for the streets. Thousands met in the City Hall on Yerevan Square every day, barracking the City Council and proposing ever more radical measures. On 29 August, a public meeting of students discussing Nicholas II’s proposal of a compromise parliament named after Interior Minister Bulygin was raided brutally by the Cossacks, who entered the hall shooting. Sixty students were killed,200 wounded.
Stalin rushed back to Tiflis to meet his ally Shaumian and plan a response, on paper and in dynamite. He wrote a leaflet, raced to Chiatura and back again in time to co-ordinate a spectacular vengeance, set for 25 September. “On Stalin’s return,” says Davrichewy, “the signal was given—a red lantern lit atop Holy Mountain. At about 8 p.m., the gangsters opened fire outside the main barracks… When the Cossacks galloped out, grenades were tossed among the child-slayers.” Stalin’s terrorists launched nine simultaneous attacks.
Bolshevik and Menshevik hit men and agitators were already cooperating on the streets. On 13 October, Stalin and the Bolsheviks met the Mensheviks and agreed to coordinate politics and terrorism to redouble the pressure on the Autocracy, which seemed on the verge of collapse. Across the Empire, workers and soldiers elected councils, or “soviets,” the most famous being in Petersburg. The peasants rampaged in the countryside, while on 6 October a strike on the Moscow—Kazan railway escalated into a general stoppage across the Empire. It seemed that Tsardom was finished.
“The coming storm,” wrote Soso, “will break over Russia any day in a mighty cleansing flood to sweep away all that is antiquated and rotten.”
In St. Petersburg, even Nicholas II, whose political antennae were as sensitive as a stone, was forced to understand that he was about to lose his realm. He was ready to make peace with the Japanese, but political concessions went against his deepest convictions of holy Autocracy. He envied and hated his most able ministers, but his mother and uncles forced him to consult the brilliant ex—Finance Minister Sergei Witte. Before leaving to make peace with Japan at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, under the aegis of U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt, Witte forcefully told the Tsar, whom he despised, to concede a constitution. Nicholas II wavered, then asked his tall, soldierly cousin, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaievich, to become military dictator.
As Romanov Autocracy tottered, we have a rare glimpse of Stalin as gang leader dealing out death in the backstreets of Tiflis.{151}
15. 1905: Fighters, Urchins and Dressmakers
One night in Tiflis in late 1905, Josef Davrichewy, Stalin’s Goreli friend, who now headed the armed wing of the Georgian Socialist-Federalists, heard fighting in a backstreet at the foot of Holy Mountain. He found Kamo, Stalin’s enforcer, threatening an unknown Armenian with his pistol.
“If you don’t return the banknotes to the safebox you were meant to guard, you’re a dead man!” Kamo was saying. “Think! I’ll count to three. One… two… careful my friend… three!”
Davrichewy ran up and seized Kamo’s arms. “Not here, you idiot. Not in this area. You know we run everything round here.” Those streets were controlled by Davrichewy’s militia. But the “overexcited” Kamo broke free and shot the other man three times.
“At the third blast,” says Davrichewy, “both of us ran for it.” The dying victim slid bleeding to the pavement.
“In God’s name, why stick your nose in our business?” asked Kamo when they were safe. “Koba’ll be furious—you know he’s not always accommodating.” Davrichewy was not happy either: “his” neighbourhood was soon crawling with policemen. But this was not the end of the affair.
Stalin sent Kamo to invite him for a powwow. When they met, Davrichewy “told him off for killing the Armenian in the neighbourhood where we maintain security.”
“Listen,” Stalin replied calmly. “Don’t worry about us. Kamo did what was necessary and you should do the same. Now I have a proposal for you: come with us. Leave the Federalists. We’re old Gorelis, I admire and remember our games. Come while there’s still time? If not…”
“If not, what?” demanded Davrichewy.
Stalin “didn’t answer but his eyes shrank and his expression became hard.”{152}
Just at that time of world-shattering events, Stalin entered the life of the other family, apart from the Alliluyevs, whose fate would be intertwined with his. He asked his protégé Svanidze to find him somewhere to live.[68] Svanidze, intelligent, blue-eyed and blond, knew just the place. The apartment at the townhouse of 3 Freilinskaya Street was right behind the military headquarters, in the centre of Tiflis, near Yerevan Square. It had many advantages: first it was populated by lovely Georgian girls. Svanidze’s three sisters, Alexandra (Sashiko), Maria (Mariko) and Ekaterina (Kato), ran Atelier Hervieu, a prosperous couture house named after its French couturier Madame Hervieu, making uniforms and dresses.
The girls were Rachvelians from Racha (in western Georgia), famous for its placid and loving beauties. Sashiko had recently married Mikheil Monoselidze, a Bolshevik who knew Stalin from the seminary, but the other two girls were single. The youngest was Kato, a curvaceous, “ravishingly pretty” brunette. Their atelier of young seamstresses made it a sunnily feminine place to be.
68
Stalin did not only know the Svanidzes via Alyosha. Simon Svanidze, father of Alyosha and his three sisters, was a teacher in Kutaisi; the mother, Sipora, one of the noble Dvali clan. In Kutaisi, Sipora’s cousin, a Dvali, was chief of police. Both the Svanidzes and Police Chief Dvali hid Stalin from the secret police, another example of how Georgian connections were more important than loyalty to the state.