Stalin considered himself superior to all the other delegates[74] except Lenin. “Among all these chatterboxes,” he boasted, “I was the only one who’d already organized and led men in combat.”
Soso headed back to Tiflis in the midst of battle.{162}
The generals massed their Cossacks, surrounded the workers’ districts, banned meetings, ordered shooting of rebels on sight and forbade anyone to wear Caucasian hoods or the cloaks that concealed weapons. On 18 January 1906, General Griiazanov began his assault. Jordania and Ramishvili ordered their partisans, who included Kamo and the Bolsheviks, to defend the Tiflis workers’ district.
There was still fighting on the streets when Stalin reached the Svanidze apartment around four days later. Anna Alliluyeva now watched from her window as the Cossacks “moved forward, shooting into the night. By dawn, troops had broken into Didube and Cossacks’ horses flashed by our windows, the streets ringed by Cossacks.” Tiflis rocked from “uninterrupted shooting, the rattle of artillery fire and cavalry on the streets.” Sixty rebels were killed, 250 wounded, 280 arrested. The woody hillsides, she recalls, were thick with dead bodies. She saw “two prisoners, one had blood on his face,” and cried out as she recognized “the most courageous and beloved of Stalin’s young pupils.”
“Kamo!”
As Griiazanov crushed Tiflis, General Alikhanov-Avarsky savagely reconquered western Georgia. The Battle Squads tried to block the railway-tunnel to Kutaisi, but the Cossacks shot, looted, burned and hanged as they advanced. They took Kutaisi. Their “troops, killing anyone they recognized, set fire to the city, robbing the taverns and shops,” remembers Tsintsadze. The west was reduced to “ashes and charcoal.” Once all was lost, Stalin, travelling in the west, tried to persuade the peasants to disarm, rather than perish, but they would not listen to him: “I was impotent.” Then Alikhanov-Avarsky moved eastwards to reconquer the lawless, scorched hinterland of Baku and the Tsar’s burning oilfields.
Tsintsadze and his pretty comrade Patsia Goldava arranged a killing-spree of all suspected traitors, who were murdered before they could escape to Tiflis. The gunmen, whom the Cossacks were seeking in the provinces, found refuge in the capital. But the days of Stalin’s Battle Squads were over. They returned to the underground where he re-formed them into a secret squad of assassins. He had a task for them already.{163}
Back in Tiflis, under the whip of the Cossacks, Stalin and the Mensheviks met to pass a death sentence. General Fyodor Griiazanov—nicknamed General Shitheap, a pun on his name—the nemesis of the Georgian Revolution, was the most hated man in the Caucasus. Stalin summoned chief assassin Tsintsadze. Soso and the Mensheviks, “working together,” jointly ordered another of their hit men, Arsene Jorjiashvili, “who belonged to Stalin’s gangsters,” to kill the General with the assistance of Kamo. But Stalin also simultaneously commissioned Tsintsadze: “Prepare some good fellows, and if Jorjiashvili fails to do the job in a week, we entrust it to you.” Tsintsadze and two of Soso’s best hit men started to stalk the General while the other group raced to kill him first.[75]
Within a few days, there were two abortive assassinations, each cancelled because the General was with his wife. Meanwhile, Griiazanov oversaw yet another massacre on the streets of Tiflis.
On 16 February, the General, flanked by a formidable Cossack bodyguard, galloped out of the military headquarters, ignoring a few Georgian workmen painting the railings around Alexander Gardens opposite the Viceroy’s Palace. As his carriage passed, the workmen dropped their paints and threw “apples”—their homemade grenades—into his lap, tearing the Butcher of Tiflis to pieces. The Cossacks gave chase. The hit men scarpered, but the wounded Jorjiashvili was swiftly caught and executed, an instant hero in Tiflis.
Who else was on the hit-team? Historians used to agree that the Mensheviks carried out the hit, but actually it was a joint effort. Tsintsadze explains that Stalin and the Mensheviks at that time worked together “in the same organization.” An Armenian terrorist said Stalin had commissioned the hit. Davrichewy specifies that the other hit man was Kamo. In the 1920s, two Bolshevik terrorists claimed a pension for killing Griiazanov, their notes recently surfacing in the Georgian archives. Stalin, it seems, commissioned both Menshevik and Bolshevik hit men.
A workman later claimed that he saw Stalin watching nearby, and this rings true because it seems he was injured by bomb fragments or in the rush to escape the Cossacks.
That night, says Sashiko, Stalin did not come home. The girls were worried: had he been arrested? Afterwards, he claimed he had run for a tram, pursued by police, but slipped, hurting himself so badly that Tskhakaya took him to Mikhailovsky Hospital and hid him at Babe Bochoridze’s place, then at another safe house, using an old friend’s passport. But after the assassination the city was under curfew, with checkpoints everywhere. Soldiers raided the apartment and found “Giorgi Berdzenoshvili” (Stalin) in bed with one bandage round his head, another over his right eye and cuts and bruises across his face.
The Russian soldiers were confused because their orders did not specify what action to take on finding a bandaged man in bed. But, as he looked too ill to move, they left to consult their superiors, sending back a cart to convey the suspicious-looking patient to prison. By then, the patient had disappeared into the night. This was neither the first nor the last time he used the mystery-man-in-bandages trick to escape the police.
In the darkness, a comrade smuggled Stalin, “head and face damaged and hidden in a hood and a big cloak,” by phaeton to another safe house.
When Stalin turned up at home with the story of falling off the tram chased by pharaohs, the Svanidze girls were relieved, especially Kato. Sashiko and her husband realized something was happening between the two of them. “Gradually,” writes Monoselidze, “when Soso was living at our place, my wife and I noticed that Soso and Kato liked each other…”{164}
17. The Man in Grey: Marriage, Mayhem (and Sweden)
On the initiative and orders of Stalin,” said one of his top gangsters, Bachua Kupriashvili,[76] a permanent gang of brigands was now assembled. “Our tasks were procuring arms, organizing prison escapes, holding up banks and arsenals, and killing traitors.” Stalin commissioned Tsintsadze to set up “the Technical Group or the Bolshevik Expropriators Club, it was soon known by another nickname—Druzhina, the Group, or just Outfit.”
The “leader of the heists,” said Stalin later, “was Kote Tsintsadze, together with Kamo.” Stalin’s boyhood friend, arrested in the storming of Didube, had been tortured horribly by the Cossacks, who almost sliced off his nose. But Kamo admitted nothing and was released. “He could bear any pain,” marvelled Stalin, “an astonishing person.”
Soso strained his ingenuity to raise cash for Lenin, travelling widely to Novorossiisk, on the Black Sea, and Vladikavkaz, in Ossetia. In Tiflis, he ordered schools and the seminary to deliver cash from their teachers while he discreetly prepared the Outfit for his gangster rackets.
Stalin would order the delivery of a letter to a businessman, illustrated with “bombs, a lacerated corpse and two crossed daggers,” then come calling with a Mauser in his belt to collect the money, according to several sources. But Stalin’s first biographer, Essad Bey, unreliable though often well informed, claims that “Soso obtained his information” about wealthy targets “through his mistress, Marie Arensberg, [a] German businessman’s wife in Tiflis.” But bank robbery was the fastest way to raise large sums.
74
The most important of these delegates was Leonid Krasin, brilliant engineer, ladies’ man and Lenin’s financial, terrorism and explosives expert, whom Stalin already knew from Baku. There, Krasin had invented the electrical generating system for oil on behalf of big business while creating an underground printing-press for the Bolsheviks. In 1905, he helped Lenin raise funds through his contacts with the plutocratic industrialists such as Savva Morozov and with the actress Kommissarzhevskaya, who had donated her boxoffice receipts, but his specialities were terror, bank robbery and bomb-making. At Tam-merfors, Stalin also met Emelian Yaroslavsky, who became his chief propagandist in power; Yakov Sverdlov, who shared his exile, became Lenin’s chief organizer and first Soviet head of state; and Solomon Lozovsky, Stalin’s future Deputy Foreign Commissar, whom he tried and shot in 1952 during his anti-Semitic terror. Lozovsky was the only one of Stalin’s victims who had the courage to defy the dictator openly in court: see
75
This management by competition was typical—it resembles the way Stalin would later order Marshals Zhukov and Konev to race each other to take Berlin in 1945.
76
Bachua Kupriashvili, one of the leading brigands in the Tiflis bank robbery, recorded his memoirs during the Stalin years. He confirms Stalin’s direct command of the Outfit but is careful not to link him directly to its heists. The memoirs have remained forgotten in the Georgian archives for sixty years.