So again he succeeded in raising money and guns, but with him there was always a human cost. The traditional Bolsheviks like Alexinsky and Zemliachka were “very indignant at these expropriations” and killings. “Stalin blamed one member for provocation. There was no definite evidence, but that person was forced out of the city, ‘judged,’ condemned to death and shot.”
Stalin prided himself on being what he called a praktik, a practical hard man, an expert on what he called “black work,” rather than a chatty intelligent, but his gift was for being both. Lenin soon heard a storm of complaints about Stalin’s banditry, but by now, writes Vulikh, Stalin “was the true boss in the Caucasus” with “a lot of supporters devoted to him who respected him as the second person in the Party after Lenin. Among the intelligentsia, he was less loved, but everybody recognized that he was the most energetic and indispensable person.”
Soso had an “electrical effect” on his followers, of whom he took good care. He had a talent for political friendship that played a major role in his rise to power. His roommate from Stockholm, Voroshilov, the eager, fair-haired and dandyish lathe-turner,[104] joined him in Baku but fell ill. “He visited me every evening,” said Voroshilov. “We joked a lot. He asked if I liked poetry and recited a whole Nekrasov poem by heart. Then we sang together. He really had a good voice and fine ear.” “Poetry and music,” Stalin told Voroshilov, “elevate the spirit!” When Alliluyev was arrested again, he worried about his family, so once released he came to consult Soso, who insisted he had to leave, giving him cash to move to Moscow. “Take the money, you’ve children, you must look after them.”
The death of Kato was a grievous blow, but even in early 1908 the widower who signed his articles “Koba Kato” found time for partying, and never lacked female company.
23. Louse Racing, Murder and Madness—Prison Games
Whenever the Outfit pulled off a heist, Stalin and Spandarian spent a little of it on a wild party. In a very Bolshevik in-joke on the Party’s endless political schisms, Soso called these festivities uklonenia— deviations.
“When Stalin collected some extra pennies,” reports A. D. Sa-kvarelidze, who ran Stalin’s cash-counterfeiting operations, “we’d hold a ‘deviational’ meeting in a remote bistro or a private room at a gorgeous restaurant, often Svet Restaurant on Trading Street, where we’d have a feast, especially after celebrating the success of some deed. Spandarian especially liked ‘deviations’ where we’d talk frankly, eat deliciously and sing loudly, particularly Stalin.” Wherever Spandarian went, girls usually followed.
A comrade from Batumi introduced his pretty sister, Alvasi Tala-kvadze, to Stalin. She was just eighteen, a self-confessed “spoilt child,” brimming with revolutionary ardour. “Koba—the head of the Baku proletariat—used the backroom of my brother’s flowerstall in the Bibi-Eibat oilfield as his base,” she explains. So Stalin took Talakvadze under his wing, giving her the moniker “Comrade Plus” because of her enthusiasm. Even in absurdly turgid Stalinist jargon, the girl’s memoirs record a close relationship: “Koba was enlightening me ideologically, conducting with me discussions on social-political subjects, and developing in me class-consciousness, introducing me to a faith in victory.” One is tempted to read “developing class-consciousness” and “introducing faith in victory” as euphemisms, because Alvasi Talakvadze later let it be known she was Stalin’s girlfriend in 1908.
His gift for conspiracy was ingenious, if sometimes macabre. This girlfriend became “adept at tricking the spooks, but Koba devised the most original tricks.” One day, he ordered her to take some secret documents to the Balakhana oilfield in a coffin. “You must play the role of a mourning sister who is burying her dead baby brother with her bare hands,” said Stalin, sending her to a cemetery and directing her performance like a playwright. “You’ll loosen your hair, hold the coffin, sob, say you’re left alone and blame yourself for his death. Don’t bury it too deeply.” He handed her a shovel. The “director” praised her performance, covertly observing her. “Even now,” she mused later, “I don’t know how he watched me so acutely.”
Alvasi Talakvadze does not seem to have been his only relationship with a comrade. He also came to know Ludmilla Stal, “a famous activist among women” who was described later as “buxom but pretty.” The daughter of the owner of a steel mill from south Ukraine, six years older than Soso, she was already a prison veteran. Soon afterwards, she went into exile in Paris. The affair was said to be intermittent, but it had an influence on the younger Stalin. They possibly met later during Stalin’s visits abroad to see Lenin, with whom Ludmilla worked closely. They certainly met again in 1917. But nothing survives of their friendship—except one surprising lifelong relic: his renowned name.
The secret police had lost Stalin when he moved cities after the Tiflis spectacular. Now they were back on his case. When Stalin’s hit man Bokov was arrested, “The Gendarme asked me: who was Stalin himself and in particular what was his role in the robbery of the [Baku port] arsenal?”
On 15 March 1908, the Gendarmes raided a Party meeting in the People’s Hall. Stalin, Shaumian and Spandarian escaped, but the Gendarmes were on the trail of the Mauserists. Just as Tsintsadze and the Outfit set the date for the holdups of the State Bank and the gold ship, Cossacks and Gendarmes “attacked our safe house.” In the shootout, several Cossacks were killed, but the Outfit lost its best Mauserist triggerman, Intskirveli, veteran of the Tiflis bank robbery. The plans were abandoned; Kavtaradze left secret work and went to Petersburg University—but he remained in Stalin’s life until the end.
On the night of 25 March, Baku’s police chief raided “several dens of delinquents where certain criminal suspects were arrested including Gaioz Besoevich Nizheradze, bearing criminal papers, who I therefore placed at the disposal of the Gendarmerie.” The man carried the passport of a nobleman named Nizheradze, but perhaps the patronymic “Son of Beso” was a better guide to the real identity of the most prominent Bolshevik in the Caucasus: “the second Lenin.” After four years, the Okhrana had got Stalin.{189}
When the new prisoner arrived in Baku’s Bailov Prison wearing a blue-satin smock and a dashing Caucasian hood, the other political prisoners passed the word to be careful. “This is secret,” they whispered. “That is Koba!” They feared Stalin “more than the police.”
The bogeyman did not disappoint. He had the “ability quietly to incite others while he himself remained on the sidelines. The sly schemer did not spurn any means necessary but managed to avoid public responsibility.” In his seven months at the famous Bailovka, set amid the oilfields, Stalin dominated its power structures. He read, studied Esperanto, which he regarded as the language of the future,[105] and stirred up a series of witch hunts for traitors that often ended in death. His reign at the Bailovka was a microcosm of his dictatorship of Russia.
104
When Marshal Voroshilov was out of Stalin’s favour in his last years, he used to plead: “But, Koba, we became friends in Baku in 1907.”
“I don’t remember,” Stalin replied. For his future life, see the Epilogue.