* Known as Yasha to the family, he was christened months later and registered years later—hence confusions about his birth. The name was probably a tribute to Stalin’s protector, Yakov “Koba” Egnatashvili.
19. Stalin in London
On 27 April/10 May 1907, after a tedious journey, Stalin and his companions Tskhakaya and Shaumian disembarked at Harwich, in England. Catching the train to London’s Liverpool Street Station,[81] they were greeted by sensational headlines in the English press, thrilled to have exotic “Anarchists” loose in the capital, which, then as now, was a notorious refuge for murderous extremists.[82]
The delegates were met by an incongruous crew of English reporters and photographers, twelve Special Branch detectives and two Okhrana agents, as well as by local sympathizers who were either English socialists or Russian exiles.
“History is being made in London!” declared the Daily Mirror, which seemed to be most fascinated by the fact that some of the revolutionaries were “women burning with zeal for the great cause”—and by their lack of luggage in that age of stately travel. “There is not a man over forty and many little over twenty”—Stalin was twenty-nine, Lenin was thirty-seven (but “we always called him the Old Man,” Stalin said later). “It was,” concluded the Daily Mirror, “a most picturesque crowd.”
As with the Soviet Union itself, the delegates were meant to be equal but some were more equal than others. Maxim Gorky, “the famous novelist,” said the Mirror, “is in London but where he is staying, only his intimate friends know.” Gorky resided with his actress-mistress in the comfort of the Hotel Imperial in Russell Square, where Lenin and Krupskaya joined them. It was wet and cold when they arrived. The domineering Lenin took charge, checked Gorky’s sheets for dampness and ordered the gasfire lit to warm their wet underwear.
“There’s going to be a right old scuffle here,” Lenin told Gorky as the Leninist socks dried. The delegates with private incomes stayed in small hotels in Bloomsbury, though Lenin and Krupskaya took rooms in Kensington Square, whence he headed out every morning to pick up his favourite takeaway, fish and chips, outside King’s Cross Station. However, money was extremely short for the poor delegates like Stalin.
Legend says he spent the first nights with Litvinov, whom he now met for the first time, in the Tower House hostel on Fieldgate Street, Stepney, which the novelist Jack London called the “monster dosshouse”: it cost sixpence for a fortnight. Its conditions were so dire that Stalin supposedly led a mutiny and got everyone rehoused. He was settled into a cramped first-floor backroom at 77 Jubilee Street in Stepney, which he rented from a Jewish-Russian cobbler and shared with Tskhakaya and Shaumian.
Foggy and wet, London was an intimidating city for a visitor from Georgia. “At the outset I found London swallowed and suffocated me,” wrote another Russian Communist visitor, Ivan Maisky, later Stalin’s Ambassador to London. “I felt lonely and lost in its giant stone ocean… with its grim rows of little houses swallowed up in a black fog.”
If London was foreign, Whitechapel, where Russian was commonly spoken, was more familiar. One hundred and twenty thousand Jewish refugees from the Russian pogroms, gangsters and socialists among them, lived in the East End. Lenin visited Rudolf Rocker’s Anarchist Club, near Stalin’s rooms in Stepney, where he ate Jewish gefilte fish. Stalin probably did so too. Soso also could hardly have missed the savage jungle of Slavic-Hebraic gang-warfare. The East End gangs, all from the Russian Empire, controlled so-called rookeries of “shootflyers” (gold-watch thieves) and “whizzers” (pickpockets). Three gangs vied for supremacy: the Bessarabian Tigers fought the Odessans, who fought the Aldgate Mob led by Darkie the Coon (a swarthy Jewish gangster named Bogard).
On arrival, Stalin and the others registered at the Polish Socialist Club on Fulbourne Street off the Whitechapel Road across from the London Hospital.[83] Observed by Special Branch detectives and excited journalists, they received their sparse allowance of two shillings a day, guidance on how to find the main Congress, and secret passwords to avoid Okhrana infiltration.
Meeting upstairs in “modest premises with little furniture belonging to a socialist club with tables and chairs and foreign autographs on the walls,” the Bolsheviks started the political business with their own factional meeting at which they elected a secret committee, and like all good conferencers, “They studied the city map.” But the Daily Mirror had no time for such mundane details. “The women are said to be conspicuous for their unflinching courage and nerve,” the reporter revealed admiringly. “Revolver practise enters their daily exercise. They drill themselves constantly in front of the mirror by which they become adept in aiming and pulling the trigger… Most of these are young girls, one being eighteen wearing her long fair hair in a long coil down her back.”
The eagle-eyed Daily Express, however, noticed “a sturdy resolute-looking man who… stood at the corner of Fulbourne Street, obviously a foreigner and equally obviously a person of some importance. Apparently unconcerned, he was taking a lively interest… This was Monsieur Seveff, one of Russia’s secret police, and his duty is to keep watch on the Russian Socialists”—who, that paper added significantly, “had little luggage.”
The delegates then proceeded to the SD Fifth Congress, taking the bus or walking to Islington, where they were amazed to find they were meeting in a church, the Brotherhood Church on Southgate Road: “down the dim and dirty streets of working-class quarters, it was like dozens of buildings, soot-grimed walls, high narrow windows, grimy roof with a short steeple.” Inside, the delegates found “a simple bare room that could hold 300–400.” Gorky was unimpressed by the church décor, “unadorned to the point of absurdity.” The vicar, the Reverend F. R. Swan, whose flock included the future Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, was a pacifist follower of William Morris.
On 30 April/13 May 1907, the father of Russian Marxism, Plekhanov, opened the Congress after delegates sang a funeral hymn for fallen comrades. Stalin watched how Lenin often sat with the tall, haunted and spectrethin Gorky, international celebrity and Bolshevik fund-raiser who had once watched a hanging in Gori.[84] The Bolsheviks sat on one side, the Mensheviks on the other; every vote was “ultra tense.”
There were 302 voting delegates representing 150,000 workers, but after the glory days of 1905 the Party was in dire straits, shattered by Nicholas II’s repressions. There were 92 Bolsheviks, most of whom were determined to continue the armed struggle of 1905 and avoid participation in the Duma. They were outnumbered by 85 Mensheviks, 54 Jewish Bundists, 45 Polish-Lithuanians and 26 Letts who supported participation in the Duma elections. Lenin also wanted to adopt the strategy of gun and ballot-box favoured in our time by terrorists from the IRA, Hamas and Hezbollah. So he used Menshevik help to win that battle before turning on them again.
The entire Party was shrinking, but the Bolsheviks had been so routed in Georgia that Stalin, Tskhakaya and Shaumian were only consultative delegates without votes.
“Who is that?” Stalin supposedly asked Shaumian as a new orator took the podium.
“Don’t you know him?” answered Shaumian. “It’s Comrade Trotsky”—real name Lev Bronstein, the undoubted star in London, who had just pulled off an escape from Siberia by dashing 400 miles through the tundra on a reindeer-propelled sleigh. Here Stalin first saw (and probably shook hands with) Trotsky, who for his part did not recall meeting his nemesis until 1913.
81
They were not meant to be in London at alclass="underline" the original plan was to hold the Congress in Copenhagen, so Stalin travelled to St. Petersburg, then to Finland and on to Malmö in Sweden, whence he and his fellow delegates were ferried to Copenhagen. But the Danes expelled them to Sweden, which sent them back to Denmark, which despatched them to Esbjerg, where they caught a steamship to London.
82
The other big news during these weeks was a plot against the life of the Tsar and a photo-portrait of the three-year-old Tsarevich Alexei headlined: TSAREVICH WEARS HIS FIRST PAIR OF KNICKERS; the wedding of the Tsar’s cousin Grand Duke Nicholas to the daughter of the Prince of Montenegro; and the birth of a son to the English Queen of Spain, headlined AN ENGLISH BABE.
84
Later in life, Gorky would become the dictator’s friend, shameful apologist, pathetic trophy and possibly victim. See