“Before I decide,” replied the soap baron, “I want to see these people.” Brailsford and Lansbury took Fels to the Brotherhood Church to watch a session. “How young they all are, how absorbed!” exclaimed the Philadel-phian, who offered the Party £1,700. Fels’s loan agreement stipulated, “We, the undersigned delegates” must repay him by 1 January 1908. Fels insisted it be signed by every delegate. Lenin agreed but then ordered the revolutionaries to use only aliases. They duly signed this extraordinary document in English, Russian or Georgian. Lenin probably just signed “Vladimir.” It is believed Stalin used a favoured alias: “Vasily from Baku.” Fels died before Lenin came to power, but his heirs were repaid in 1917.
When Churchill[86] met Stalin for the first time in 1942, they bonded, after a frosty start, in a nocturnal Kremlin drinking marathon at which the Prime Minister asked about this London visit.
“Lenin, Plekhanov, Gorky and others were there,” Stalin answered.
“Trotsky?” asked Churchill about the enemy whom Stalin had had assassinated two years earlier.
“Yes, he was there,” replied Stalin, “but went away a disappointed man not having been given any organization to represent such as the Battle Squads which Trotsky hoped for…” Even thirty years later and after murdering his great enemy, Stalin was still proud that he had commanded Battle Squads while the celebrated War Commissar Trotsky had not.
“The London Congress is over,” reported “Koba Ivanovich,” Stalin’s latest pseudonym, in the Bakinsky Proletary, “ending in the victory of Bolshevism.”
However Stalin and Shaumian remained in London to nurse Tskhakaya, who had fallen sick. “I had a temperature of 39 or even more,” recounts Tskhakaya, so Stalin and Shaumian stayed on “to care for me because we all lived in one room.”
There is a legend among Welsh Communists that, after the Congress, Stalin forsook his nursing duties to visit the miners of the Valleys: after all, his 1905 stronghold, Chiatura, was a mining town. But despite a miraculous blossoming of sightings of “Stalin in Wales” among the Communists of the Rhondda during the Second World War, there is not the slightest evidence that he visited Wales.[87] Besides, he had not yet invented the name “Stalin.” But he was also supposedly spotted on the docks of Liverpool, a Scouse version of his encounter with the London dockers. Sadly, “Stalin in Liverpool” belongs with “Stalin in Wales” in that fabulous realm of urban mythology, regional aspirational fantasia and leftist personality cult.{177}
After about three weeks in London, Soso spent a week in Paris. Then, borrowing the papers of a just-deceased Georgian, Simon Jvelaya, he arrived home in Tiflis on the eve of the big bank robbery.{178}
20. Kamo Goes Insane: The Game of Bandits and Cossacks
On 10 May 1907, Kamo was setting the fuse on one of Krasin’s bombs when it exploded in his face. He almost lost an eye, but he managed to get secret treatment and recover sufficiently to lead the Outfit on the big day that was getting closer. The other gangsters missed their arrested chief, Tsintsadze, considering Kamo a self-promoting attention-seeker. “Kamo was very pleased with himself,” said Kupriashvili, “showing off his value to important comrades and bragging.”
Stalin got home by 4 June, just after Nicholas II’s energetic Premier, Peter Stolypin, launched his reactionary coup, resetting the Duma election rules to ensure a conservative majority and intensifying his harsh crackdown on the revolutionaries. Many were arrested, many deported to Siberia in prison-trains dubbed “Stolypin carriages,” and so many hanged that the noose was nicknamed “Stolypin’s necktie.” There had been 86,000 political prisoners in 1905; by 1909 there were 170,000.
Kamo gathered a large team of Georgia’s finest hoodlums and bank robbers, including the core of the Outfit and the five female shooters. They lived and waited in a small communal apartment while Kamo himself rented a grand residence, “living under cover as a prince.” The Okhrana believed there were about sixty brigands involved in the heist, so it is likely that the Bolsheviks recruited help from the SRs and other top triggermen: the terrorists often cooperated, most recently when Krasin provided the SRs with the bombs to dynamite Premier Stolypin’s home. If the SRs hoped for a cut of the booty, they were to be disappointed.
Stalin informed the Bolshevik Tiflis Committee of Lenin’s orders given to him in Berlin; they approved the operation. He must have expected local outrage and international scandaclass="underline" Kamo and the gunmen resigned temporarily from the Party, on Lenin’s suggestion, thus technically liberating themselves from the London resolution. Stalin and Shaumian planned to move to Baku directly afterwards. The Bolsheviks were finished in Georgia, with as few as 500 supporters. Soso was consciously burning his Georgian bridges and starting afresh in a more ambitious enviroment.[88]
Early on 13 June, Kamo confirmed to Stalin and Shaumian that the heist would take place that day. The gangsters waited at the Tilipuchuri Tavern, where Stalin was supposedly seen early that morning.[89] Somewhere before 10 a.m., rigged up in his officer’s uniform, swashbuckling his Circassian sabre, Kamo rode out into Yerevan Square; the gangster boys and girls took up their positions. It was a warm summer’s day.
When the bombs shook the city, Kato Svanidze Djugashvili was cuddling Stalin’s three-month-old baby, Laddie, on the balcony beside her sister, Sashiko. “We rushed inside, absolutely terrified,” says Sashiko Svanidze. For the rest of the day, the wounded were treated in makeshift surgeries. Cossacks and Gendarmes galloped through the city, raiding houses, cordoning off boroughs and blocks in the hope of recovering the money before it left Tiflis.
“That night,” reports Sashiko, “Soso came home and told us that Kamo and his gang had done it, stealing 250,000 roubles for the Party.” He must have told the sisters about Kamo’s playacting because they realized why he had just borrowed their father’s sword. The Svanidze memoirs show that, far from being innocently oblivious of Stalin’s double life, Kato was perfectly aware that she was married to the godfather of bank robberies in the Caucasus. But Stalin suddenly informed the family that his wife and baby were to leave imminently for Baku. The Svanidzes did not approve. They must have felt strongly, because even in the 1930s the family dared criticize Stalin for taking her on the thirteen-hour train ride “in such a hot summer” and with a baby. But it was to no avaiclass="underline" “Soso left for Baku and took Kato,” grabbing 15,000 roubles for his future plans.
Kamo lay low. Before leaving, he graciously offered Stalin’s “inside man” 10,000 roubles for his help. Voznesensky graciously accepted 5,000.
Now things again started to go wrong. The police announced that 100,000 roubles in 500 denomination notes were marked. Some gangsters wanted to burn the notes. Kamo refused. The rest of the cash was in smaller denominations.
All the hoodlums wanted to meet Lenin, but Kamo’s eye needed foreign treatment, so it was he, bearing most of the money, who took the train via Baku to Lenin in Finland. Prince Koki Dadiani, whose family had once ruled Mingrelia, again lent Kamo his passport. Adding a new layer to this favourite disguise, Kamo now posed as the Prince accompanied by his new young bride (one of the female gangsters, ironically, but usefully, a policeman’s daughter) on the day after his wedding. The Outfit’s girls were already experienced in hiding money and dynamite on their persons: the dynamite gave off a harsh acidic stench especially when strapped to a sweating body, so the ladies had to douse themselves in scent. Money was easier, the swag travelled in the bride’s lingerie and clothes. Venal policemen had probably been bribed to turn a blind eye.
86
Churchill, aged thirty-three, was living at his bachelor flat at Mount Street WI while Stalin, twenty-nine, was staying as Koba Ivanovich in Stepney. Already Under-Secretary for the Colonies in the Liberal government of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, he had just published his biography of his father, Lord Randolph. He was famous enough for a biography of himself to be published, the first. While Stalin was in England, Churchill travelled up to give a speech in Scotland which was reported in the papers.
87
“Stalin in Wales” persists: the Welsh writer John Summers “confirmed” it on a visit to the mining town founded by a Welshman, Hughesovska (now Donetsk) in the Soviet Union in the 1970s. A Welsh website still lists Stalin among “scary individuals who have spent quality-time in Wales,” alongside the serial-killer Fred West, the magician Aleister Crowley, the Nazi Rudolf Hess and the Ugandan tyrant Idi Amin: “Stalin briefly visited the South Wales valleys to garner support and raise funds for the Russian Revolution.” Of Stalin’s helpers, Fyodor Rothstein, the Bolshevik fixer in London, became Soviet Ambassador to Persia, dying before the Terror. His son Andrew Rothstein enjoyed a strange career between the English Establishment and the Stalinist
88
The Bolshevik position in Georgia was undermined by the assassination of the hugely popular Prince Ilya Chavchavadze, who had published Soso’s poems, in August 1907. The Bolsheviks had attacked his patriarchical version of Georgian culture and, it was widely believed, had decided to kill him; there is some evidence that Stalin’s friend Sergo Ordzhonikidze organized or took part in the assassination. It may be that the SDs played no role in the murder at all. Stalin always praised Chavchavadze’s poetry in his old age and there is no evidence that he ordered the hit, but he was very close to Sergo and he was certainly more than capable of separating literary merit from cruel necessity: politics always came first.
89
Stalin himself later implied he was in the Tamamshev Caravanserai and saw Tsintsadze give the gangsters their pep talk, but Tsintsadze had just been arrested. Perhaps the old dictator was muddling this bank robbery with another, that of 1912 (see Chapter 29). In 1907 Kamo was presumably the pep talker.