Stalin rushed back again from Baku to find the mother of his Laddie dying. He “nursed her desperately and tenderly, suffering himself,” but it was too late. She supposedly called for a priest to give her final sacraments and Stalin promised her an Orthodox burial. Two weeks after her return home, on 22 November 1907, Kato, aged just twenty-two, “died in his arms.”[97] Stalin was poleaxed.{185}
22. Boss of the Black City: Plutocrats, Protection-Rackets and Piracy
Soso closed Kato’s eyes himself. Stunned, he managed to stand beside his wife’s body with the family for a photograph but then collapsed. “Nobody could believe Soso was so wounded,” wrote Elisabedashvili. He sobbed that “he couldn’t manage to make her happy.”
Soso was in such despair that his friends were worried about leaving him with his Mauser. “I was so overcome with grief that my comrades took my gun away from me,” he later told a girlfriend. “I realized how many things in life I hadn’t appreciated. While my wife was alive, there were times I didn’t return home at night. I told her when I left not to worry about me but when I got home, she’d be sitting there. She’d wait up all night.”[98]
The death was announced in Tskaro newspaper;[99] and the funeral was held at 9 a.m. on 25 November 1907, at the Kulubanskaya Church, right next to the Svanidze home—where they had married. The body was then conveyed through the town and buried at St. Nina’s Church in Kukia. The Orthodox funeral was both traumatic and farcical. Stalin, pale and tearful, “was very downcast yet greeted me in a friendly way like the old days,” remembers Iremashvili. Soso took him aside. “This creature,” he gestured at the open coffin, “softened my heart of stone. She died and with her died my last warm feelings for humanity.” He placed his hand over his heart: “It’s all so desolate here, so indescribably desolate.”
At the burial, Soso’s habitual control cracked. He threw himself into the grave with the coffin. The men had to haul him out. Kato was buried—but, just then, revolutionary konspiratsia disrupted family grief. Soso noticed some Okhrana agents sidling towards the funeral. He scarpered towards the back of the graveyard and vaulted over the fence, disappearing from his own wife’s funeral—an ironic comment on his marital negligence.
For two months, Stalin vanishes from the record. “Soso sank into deep grief,” says Monoselidze. “He barely spoke and nobody dared speak to him. All the time he blamed himself for not accepting our advice and for taking her to Baku in the heat.” Perhaps sensing the subdued anger in the Svanidze household, Soso went home to his mother in Gori to grieve. When he met one of his school friends, “He cried like a brat, hard as he was.”
“My personal life is shattered,” sobbed Stalin. “Nothing attaches me to life except socialism. I’m going to dedicate my existence to that!” This was the sort of rationalization that he would use to explain ever more unspeakable tragedies which he himself arranged for his family and friends. In old age, he talked wistfully and tenderly about his Kato. He paid her a characteristic compliment. He signed his first articles in tribute to his father (“Besoshvili”), but now he chose a new byline: “K. Kato” (Koba Kato).
Even though his son was in Tiflis, he had no intention of moving back to that parochial “marsh” where he was already a political outcast. So he abandoned his son for more than ten years.
“Kato died,” says Monoselidze, “leaving eight-month-old Laddie to us.” Kato’s mother, Sepora, and the Monoselidzes raised the baby, whom Stalin barely even visited. Perhaps Laddie reminded him of the entire disaster.
This was not the Georgian way. The family, while awed by his conspiratorial competence, were appalled. In their memoirs, the Svanidzes and Elisabedashvili, writing thirty years later during Stalin’s dictatorship, though before the Terror, courageously recorded their disapproval of his behaviour, making it clear they continued to blame his neglect for Kato’s death.
“After that,” Monoselidze concludes tellingly, “Soso went to Baku and I didn’t see him until 1912, though we got a letter from exile asking for some wine and jam.”{186}
When Stalin emerged from mourning at the end of 1907, he joined decadent Spandarian for a New Year’s Eve dinner in a Baku restaurant. He was among old friends in the revolutionary capital of the Empire. The Bolsheviks there formed a cast reunion of Stalin’s career so far: as the Bolsheviks dwindled in Russia itself, Russian and Caucasian revolutionaries flooded into Baku, often interfering with Stalin’s work.[100] It was probably quite a party because Spandarian, who was “very close to Stalin in moral character,” was also “an incredibly lazy and sybaritic ladies’ man and lover of money.” Spandarian’s womanizing did not worry his wife, Olga, who said, “Suren never swore to be faithful to me, only to remain for ever the Knight of the Idea” of Bolshevism. But the Bolshevik playboy certainly shocked his comrades. “All the children in Baku,” recalls Tatiana Vulikh, “who are up to three years old look like Spandarian!”
Soso threw himself into his work again, reassembling the Outfit. He and Spandarian immediately started to push for more radical strikes and agitation, calling on the often illiterate Azeri and Persian workers to support them. Most intellectuals were too snobbish to bother with these illiterates, but Soso packed meetings with the Muslims, who voted for him en masse. One of his important contributions was to promote and work with the radicals of Himmat (Energy), a Muslim Bolshevik group. The Muslims often hid Stalin in mosques when he was on the run. In a row with Mensheviks, one of Stalin’s Muslim allies drew a dagger on Devdariani.
Through these Muslim connections, Stalin helped arm the Persian Revolution. He sent fighters and arms under Sergo to overthrow the Shah of Persia, Mohammed Ali, whom his Bolsheviks tried to assassinate. Stalin even crossed the border to Persia himself to organize his partisans, visiting Resht: the 1943 Teheran Conference was not his first time in Iran.
Shaumian was rattled by the crushing success of the Tsar’s backlash. He and Yenukidze, who had just returned from exile, took a more “rightist” moderate approach than Stalin, but could not break his dominance. Shaumian urged restraint. Stalin mocked his privileged existence, intriguing against him with his “closest friend and right-hand man, Spandarian.” After Stalin’s death, it was said he feuded with Shaumian, but this tension has been exaggerated. They worked well together—with mutual suspicion.{187}
Soon after his return, Stalin left on a secret trip to visit Lenin, who had now settled in Geneva. We know they met sometime in 1908, we know Stalin went to Switzerland. Stalin himself mentioned such a meeting in his reminiscences. He also met Plekhanov, who “exasperated” him. Stalin “was convinced he was a congenital aristocrat.” What really turned him against the sage was the fact that “Plekhanov’s daughter had aristocratic manners, dressed in the latest fashions, and wore boots with high heels!” Stalin was already at least partly a sanctimonious ascetic.{188}
97
The family, who were there and know best, write that she suffered a stomach complaint, haemorrhagic colitis and typhus. Almost certainly Kato suffered intestinal or peritoneal TB (not always associated with pulmonary TB), which leads to weight loss, stomach pain, diarrhoea and bowel bleeding. Levan Shaumian, who grew up in Stalin’s home in the 1920s, says she died of TB and pneumonia. Typhus is spread by infected water and food, typhoid by bedbugs and reduced resistance, but both flourish among the poor and malnourished—and both can lead to bleeding bowels and darkening rashes. There was no treatment until the 1950s. Katevan Gelovani, a close Svanidze relative interviewed in Tbilisi by this author, calls it “stomach cancer,” which may be her explanation of the bleeding from the bowels. Mariam Svanidze, another cousin still alive in Tbilisi (aged 109) and interviewed by this author on 31 October 2005, remembers the death clearly. “I was then nine years old. Kato and my father got typhus at the same time. Books say Kato died of TB, but I can assure you it was typhus,” says this sturdy and lucid centenarian wearing a floral dressing-gown in a Tbilisi old people’s home. “Both got the red rash. We knew if the rash went black, they’d die. My father’s rash stayed red. He lived, but I remember that Kato’s turned black. Then all the family knew she’d die. And die she did.”
98
Stalin’s reaction to the death is very similar to his behaviour after the suicide of his second wife, Nadya Alliluyeva, in 1932, down to the suicide threat, self-pity and blaming himself for neglect.
99
The announcement of the death read: “We notify our comrades, friends and family of the death of Ekaterina Semyonovna Svanidze Djugashvili, expressing the deepest sorrow on behalf of Josef, husband, Simon and Sepora, parents, and Alexandra, Alexander and Mariko, siblings.” Mikheil Monoselidze adds, “In 1936, I buried my wife, Sashiko, next to Kato.” Sashiko died of cancer, but it might have been a mercy. By the early 1930s, the Svanidzes were among Stalin’s most intimate courtiers. But their fortunes would be suddenly and terribly reversed: their story is told in the Epilogue. The Tiflis grave, with photographs of Kato and Sashiko, is still there; so is an old fence at the back of the cemetery, perhaps the one Stalin vaulted to escape the police. Among the gravediggers, there is a story that because Kato died of typhus, the authorities first tried to bury her in a mass “plague grave” but that the family recovered the body and buried her themselves.
100
He met up again now with his comrades from Tiflis such as Sergo, Budu “the Barrel” Mdivani, Alliluyev, Kavtaradze, the gangster Tsintsadze, most of the Outfit—and the tall, blue-eyed Shaumian. Stalin’s new friend Voroshilov and his old friend Yenukidze were soon joined by Lenin’s special agent, the well-connected but severe noblewoman Elena Stasova (“Comrade Absolute”), Rozalia Zemliachka, Alexinsky and a girl named Ludmilla Stal. But there were also many Mensheviks from his past, such as Devdariani. It was a small world.