Stalin “was a wonderful organizer,” believed Monoselidze, “and hugely serious, but he’d very rarely lose his temper. Soso often didn’t even have cash to buy cigarettes. Once at midnight Kato let him in. He showed me he had fresh vegetables, cucumbers, heads of boiled lamb and pig, and two bottles of red wine.”
“Come on, man,” exclaimed Stalin. “Let’s have a feast! The Party gave me a salary of 10 roubles!”
At the haute couture—cum—terrorist headquarters, the Revolution affected the sweet-natured Kato too: She was in Yerevan Square the day the Cossacks massacred students and workers there. Her sisters, fearing that she was dead, found her helping the wounded in a scene that resembled a minor battlefield.
Stalin and Kato were falling for one another: even when he was on the run, he crept back for trysts in Madame Hervieu’s salon. At one rendezvous in the atelier, Gendarme lieutenant Stroev approached the house with two man-hunting German dogs. Madame Hervieu rushed in and warned the lovers. Soso jumped out of the back window—though probably the Gendarme was innocently calling to order a new uniform. Stalin revelled in this sort of escapade. He so often visited his Menshevik friend Minadora Toroshelidze after dark that her mother-in-law started to grumble that her reputation would suffer.
“What can I do? If they see me by day they’ll nab me,” laughed Stalin. It was to Minadora that he liked to call himself “the Man in Grey.”{167}
On 15 April, the Avlabar printing-press, the Party’s most invaluable treasure, was betrayed and raided by the police. Stalin’s Menshevik enemies accused him of turning double-agent, a story repeated as truth in most biographies. But did he really betray the printing-press?
In March 1906, Stalin attended a Party conference in Tiflis and Baku sporting “a great coat, and a beard on his sharp face—for he was all sharpness—and a many-coloured scarf in cross-stripes, resembling a Jewish prayer-shawl[78] plus a sort of bowler-hat.” After the conference, Razhden Arsenidze, a Menshevik, claimed that Stalin was arrested but mysteriously released. “I witnessed,” writes Arsenidze, “how Stalin was freed from the Gendarme Department and didn’t appear at Metekhi Prison despite his stories of his triumphant appearance there to the applause of the other prisoners—that was just the fantasy of a self-enamoured storyteller. There were lots of rumours about his treachery…”
Stalin was surely arrested after the conference, possibly detained in another Tiflis prison such as Ortachala, and then released. Most likely, he used his ill-gotten gains to bribe Gendarmes, who were in any case confused about his identity. But he attracted, almost courted, such accusations because he was rude and arrogant, and he specialized professionally in sailing close to the wind. There is not the slightest evidence of this treachery—and there is a rather large hole in the story.
This arrest was said to be at the time of the Avlabar raid, but in fact by 15 April Stalin was on a long, well-documented journey, a thousand miles away, in Sweden.{168}
Around 4 April 1906, Stalin left for Stockholm to see Lenin again, and arrived after a comical journey that featured a shipwreck and an onboard factional punch-up.
He took the train to Petersburg and thence to Hangö in Finland with a hundred others who boarded the ship Oihonna for Stockholm. The passengers included Stalin, Krasin and a circus of clowns and performing-horses. The snobbish Mensheviks tried to spend their funds on first-class tickets, despatching the rougher Bolsheviks to third-class. The delegates drank too much and then got into a fistfight, though whether this involved the clowns is not recorded. Sea air seems to have stimulated pugnacity in the revolutionaries.
Then to cap a truly bizarre scene, just outside the harbour, the Oihonna was shipwrecked and the rescue barge Solid was sent out but could do nothing. Stalin spent the night on a sinking ship wearing a life-jacket until rescued. They boarded another ship, the Wellamo, which finally conveyed them to Sweden.
On arrival in Stockholm, Stalin had to report to the police station, where he was interrogated by the walrus-moustached Superintendent Bertil Mogren of the Swedish Criminal Investigation Department, who frequently served as a bodyguard to King Oscar II. Stalin was, he noted, “small, thin, [with] black hair and beard, pockmarked, big nose, grey Ulster coat and leather cap.” Stalin identified himself as “the journalist Ivan Ivanovich Vissarionovich wanted by the [Russian] police,” using his father’s name as his surname—“Son of Vissarion.” He also gave Superintendent Mogren his new birthday—21 December 1879. He had one hundred roubles in his pocket and said he was staying for two weeks at the shabby Hotel Bristol (which no longer exists) near Stockholm Station before heading for Berlin.
The Fourth Congress, opening on 10 April, was a much more important meeting than the Finnish conference because its 156 delegates represented the union of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Polish Socialists and Jewish Bundists. Most of the Mensheviks were Georgians: the Bolsheviks were outnumbered. Jordania, Isidore Ramishvili and Uratadze from Kutaisi Prison were among the sixteen Georgians, of whom Stalin was the only Bolshevik.
In Stockholm, he met many of the men[79] who would be important in his own road to power: he shared his hotel room with a metalworker, mounted postman and working-class dandy (who favoured winged-collars and ballroom-dancing) named Klimenti Voroshilov, who would become his Defence Commissar, First Marshal and accomplice in the 1937 slaughter of the Soviet military. Blond, rosy-cheeked and blue-eyed Voroshilov, another choirboy, was charmed by the “jolly and zestful” Stalin, “a bundle of nervous energy” who liked to sit on his bed reciting poems by heart.
At the Congress, Stalin listened to the titans of Marxism, Plekhanov, Martov and Lenin, but remained proudly his own man on the two main issues: on the peasantry, Lenin proposed nationalization of the land, while the Mensheviks suggested municipalization. Stalin rejected both: the man who would one day oversee the deaths of 10 million peasants in his collectivization campaign, at this time proposed giving land to the peasants. Lenin was defeated with Stalin’s help.
When the Congress debated whether to run in elections for the Imperial Duma, most Bolsheviks were against, but Lenin supported the idea and voted with the winning Mensheviks. Stalin abstained. The gathering optimistically called itself the Unity Congress, but the Bolsheviks were simply outvoted. Lenin and Krasin, his urbane money-laundering and terrorism maestro, made themselves scarce when the Congress passed a resolution to ban the bank robberies. Defeat, wrote Stalin, “transformed Lenin into a spring of compressed energy which inspired his followers.” But Lenin had no intention of giving up his bank robbing—he needed the money.
Lenin and Krasin must have discussed more bank robberies with Stalin because he arranged for Kamo to travel north from Tiflis to collect guns and bombs from their Finnish villa. If so, this was the first time that Lenin observed Stalin’s value as a ruthless underground operator as well as a forceful independent politician.{169}
On the way home, Soso met up in Berlin with Alyosha Svanidze, who was studying at Leipzig University, but he was in Tiflis by June.{170}
78
This must be the scarf, resembling a Jewish prayer-shawl, that Stalin was wearing in the famous police mugshot (see this book’s cover) taken during this mysterious arrest.
79
Stalin here met for the first time the Polish socialist Felix Dzerzhinsky, who would become founder of the Soviet secret police, the Cheka, and his ally in the power struggles after Lenin’s death; Grigory Radomyslsky, the Jewish milkman’s son soon known as “Zinoviev,” his triumvir after Lenin’s death, whom Stalin liquidated with Kamenev in 1936; and Alexei Rykov, Lenin’s successor as Premier, with whom Stalin would share power for a while and then liquidate in 1938. At the Congress, Stalin also met up with old friends Said Devdariani, from the seminary; Kalinin, his future Head of State, whom he knew through the Alliluyevs; and his Tiflis comrade Stepan Shaumian.