Stalin’s other “inside man” was Grigory “Gigo” Kasradze, another Goreli, a cousin of Keke and Father Charkviani, who was interviewed by a different Party investigation committee. He too was groomed by Stalin for months before the robbery. Both were part of Stalin’s own private intelligence network.
Kamo, after the sinking of the Zara, lacked the necessary armaments for these new operations so Stalin sent him back to see Krasin. A grand sympathizer, Prince Koki Dadiani, lent him his passport, allowing him to travel to the capital in style. At their Finnish hideout, Kamo met Lenin and Krupskaya. “He was a fearless fighter of limitless audacity and unbreakable willpower,” Krupskaya observes, “but also exceedingly sensitive, somewhat naïve…” Lenin called him his “Caucasian bandit,” thrilled that he always packed two pistols, which he regularly invited Krupskaya’s noble mother to strap on. Lenin and Krupskaya, both brought up with privilege and culture, courted Kamo. They were always drawn to the glamour (and utility) of brutal cutthroats, following the sentiments of the anarchist Bakunin: for the Revolution to triumph, he wrote, “we must join with the swashbuckling robber-world, the true and only revolutionaries in Russia.”
Entranced by Kamo’s simple-eyed sweetness, the Lenins sensed that his strange tranquillity might, at any moment, be shattered by an act of insane violence. He once met the Lenins for lunch saying he had a present for them, which he slowly placed on the table wrapped in a napkin. “Everyone went silent. ‘He’s got a bomb!’ they thought,” recounts Krupskaya. “But it was a watermelon.” Kamo returned to Tiflis with a shipment of grenades.{174}
Lenin, according to Stalin’s gangster Kupriashvili, ordered Stalin to raise much-needed funds to pay for the coming London Congress. Stalin kept in contact with Kamo and his inside men in the banking system but also travelled back to Baku, where he was busy founding and editing the Russian newspaper Bakinsky Proletary (Baku Worker) with Shaumian and Spandarian. Involved in so much skulduggery, Soso seemed untouchable. But, while he was away, his wife was not so lucky.
During a raid on a Bolshevik in Moscow, the Okhrana found a note that read: “3 Freilinskaya Street, seamstress Svanidze, ask for Soso.” Not long afterwards, Kamo asked the Svanidzes to host a “Moscow Jewish comrade” for two weeks. The sisters welcomed him but soon after his departure, on 13 November 1906, the Gendarmes raided the house asking for Soso and Kato. The sisters realized that the “Moscow Jewish comrade” was a traitor. The Gendarmes fortunately did not find either Soso or his documents hidden inside the fashion mannequins. But Kato was arrested—along with her cousin, the bomb-maker Spiridon Dvali, who was sentenced to death. This was no joke for a girl already four months pregnant.
Sashiko Svanidze sprang into action to help Stalin’s wife, calling in the favours of her clients, who included most of the Gendarme officers: “I went to see the wife of Gendarme Colonel Rechitsky (whose dress I was making at the time) and requested her to reduce Dvali’s death penalty and to release the innocent Kato.” The Colonel’s wife did get Dvali’s sentence reduced and helped the pregnant Kato even more by allowing her to await her release in a police station instead of prison. The sisters were also making the gowns for the wife of the police station chief, who immediately took Kato home with her and looked after her.
On Stalin’s return after his frantic shuttling around the Caucasus, “He was deeply despondent about what had happened,” notes Monoselidze. “He insisted on visiting Kato,” so Sashiko went to see the wife of the police station chief and “told her our cousin from our village had come to visit Kato. The police officer’s wife permitted it, so we took Soso to their apartment at night and they had a rendezvous there. Fortunately none of them knew Soso by sight. The police officer’s wife demanded that Kato be allowed home for two hours every evening. Soso and Kato met every evening like that” until her release two months later.
Soon after her release, on 18 March 1907, Kato was delivered of a son, Yakov.* According to Kato’s cousin Ketevan Gelovani, Soso was present for the birth along with his mother. Keke and “the little woman” Kato got on very well. Stalin was over the moon at being a father. “After the birth of the baby,” Monoselidze observes, “his love for wife and child became ten times more.” He nicknamed the baby “Patsana” (Laddie). Writing day and night, however, Stalin became “irritated when the baby’s crying disturbed his work. But as soon as the mother fed it and the baby stopped crying, he kissed him, tickling his nose, fondling him.”
Soso had much on his mind. That March 1907, Stalin’s Outfit planned a heist on the Kutaisi stagecoach, but, just before the chosen day, its chieftain, Tsintsadze, was arrested. Stalin appointed Kamo as his successor. Stalin’s pet psychopath was more than capable of controlling the band of bandits, always tottering between simple enthusiasm and frenzied killing. When he heard a Bolshevik, probably Stalin, arguing theory with a Menshevik, he exclaimed: “What are you arguing with him for? Let me slit his throat.” Kamo, with Tsintsadze’s female gunslingers Anneta, Patsia and Alexandra, held up the Kutaisi stagecoach—but the Cossacks fired back. Kamo and the girls found themselves in the midst of a savage fire-fight, but when it was at its most intense the girls swooped in and grabbed the money-bags, which they then smuggled to Tiflis in their lingerie. “Anneta and I wrapped it around our bodies,” recalls Alexandra Darakhe-lidze. Kamo hid the cash in wine-sacks and sent it to Lenin in Finland.
Stalin’s inside men in the banking mail now informed the Outfit that a huge delivery was due in Tiflis—it might be as big as a million roubles, enough to fund Lenin’s expensive organization for years. Stalin and Kamo prepared for a spectacular heist.
Barely a month later, Stalin, elected as non-voting delegate to the Fifth Congress, left Laddie and Kato in Tiflis, setting off on a long journey via Baku, St. Petersburg, Stockholm and Copenhagen. Stalin, travelling under the name “Ivanovich,” was on his way to London.{175}
Around 24 April, when he was in Denmark, he took the train down to Berlin to meet Lenin. We know they met secretly on this trip and that Stalin visited Berlin. They had one subject to discuss: the imminent Tiflis bank robbery. If Lenin went to Berlin, writes Trotsky, “then it was not for theoretical conversation but was undoubtedly devoted to the impending expropriations and the means of forwarding the money.” The secrecy was aimed as much at their comrades as at the Okhrana: the Party, now dominated by Mensheviks, had banned brigandage.
Lenin and Stalin then proceeded separately to London.{176}
* This was true especially after the 1907 London Congress banned expropriations and ordered expulsion from the Party for those who disobeyed. But this was September 1906—the London Congress was in the future.
* This piracy was quite common among the revolutionary bandits: Stalin’s Gori alter ego, Davrichewy, chief of the military wing of the Socialist-Federalists, tells how he robbed a ship carrying funds at roughly the same time as the Tsarevich Giorgi heist. Meanwhile, off Odessa, revolutionaries seized a noble dinner-party on a pleasure ship, the Sofia, where they grabbed £5,000 in gold.
† At this time Krasin loaned his most advanced infernal device to the Maximalist-SR terrorists, who used it to blow up the house of the Tsar’s brilliant Premier Stolypin. Many were killed in the inferno but Stolypin survived.
* Later Stalin’s People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs during the 1930s, Maxim Litvinov.