He now gave her his ultimate compliment: he jettisoned the pen name “K. Kato” and became “K. Stefin,” based on Stefania—and a step nearer “Stalin.” The adoption of the names of lovers as pen names is a peculiarity in such a chauvinist. We have no letters between them. But the “K. Stefin” shows that Stefania was important to him. They moved in together—or, as the secret police noted, the Milkman “cohabited with his concubine.”
There now started a farrago of bewildering scandals that revealed that Stalin’s Party was riddled with Tsarist spies. Stalin reacted by unleashing a hysterical, murderous witch hunt for traitors which only succeeded in destroying the innocent—and drawing suspicion onto himself. It began in September 1909, when Stalin’s own secret-police contacts warned him that his valuable printing-press had been betrayed by an Okhrana doubleagent: it was about to be raided. The press had to be swiftly moved and secretly reassembled in new premises.
Stalin “rushed to me,” recalls his henchman Vatsek, “and asked me to get cash. I got him 600 roubles from Mancho,” the oil baron. But it was not enough. A little later, “Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili came running with Budu Mdivani.” The tycoon then gave Stalin another 300 roubles.
Stalin found the press a new secret location in the Baku old city, setting it up in the dark cellars and alleyways of the Persian Fortress. But he discovered that the married couple who actually ran the press had embezzled money. He sent his Mauserists after them. The husband got away. The wife was interrogated by Stalin’s gunmen, but she somehow escaped before she could be liquidated.
In October 1909, the police raided a safe house to pick up Stalin’s fellow Baku Bolshevik, Prokofi “Alyosha” Japaridze. The policemen were surprised to find Stalin and Sergo with Japaridze. The ranking detective, as ever incapable of independent thought, left some policemen on guard and went to consult his superiors. Stalin and Sergo bribed the policemen with ten roubles. Japaridze had to stay and face arrest, but Stalin and Sergo were allowed to escape.
Stalin, on a tip-off from another of his contacts in the Baku Okhrana, blamed these betrayals on the Secretary of the Bolshevik Oil Workers Union, Leontiev. Stalin decided that there were five Okhrana double-agents in the Party. He decided to kill Leontiev, but the latter called his bluff, reappearing and demanding a Party trial. Stalin refused to hold a trial since this would reveal his moles inside the Okhrana. Leontiev was let off, raising suspicions about Stalin’s own relationship with the secret police.
“The betrayal of someone with whom you’ve shared everything,” said Stalin later, “is so horrible, no actor or writer can express it—it’s worse than the very bite of Death!” Stalin orchestrated a cannibalistic inquisition in Baku to find traitors, real and imagined, just as he would across the entire USSR in the 1930s. The difference is that in Baku the Party really was infested with police spies.
Stalin printed the names of the five “traitors,” but secret-police archives reveal that only one was, in fact, a spy; all the others were innocent. The witch hunt gathered pace. When Baku was visited by a top Moscow Bolshevik named Chernomazov, “Comrade Koba stared disgustedly at him. ‘You’re a traitor!’ he shouted.” In this case, Stalin was right.
The disarray was reported to the gleeful Baku Okhrana by their real spies code named “Fikus” and “Mikheil,” the traitors who really had infiltrated the Bolsheviks but were never identified by witchfinder-general Stalin. No doubt in Baku he ordered innocent people killed as traitors just as he would in the Terror.
It was a mess. Soso liked to fix such messes with quiet killings, but that did not work this time. He and another comrade accused each other of being spooks. Indeed the Mensheviks, and some Bolsheviks, suspected that Stalin himself, with his secret-police contacts, was the biggest traitor of the lot. So was he betraying the Party to the police? Here is the case against Stalin.
Stalin certainly cultivated shadowy Tsarist connections, receiving a stream of mysterious tip-offs from contacts in the secret police. Once Stalin was walking in Baku’s streets with a comrade when an Okhrana officer approached him. “I know you’re a revolutionary,” he said. “Here’s a list of all your comrades who will be arrested in the near future.” On another occasion, a comrade arrived to meet Stalin at a Party safe house and was startled to pass a senior Gendarme officer on his way out. He challenged Stalin, who said the Gendarme was aiding the Bolsheviks.
In Tiflis, during a roundup of revolutionaries, Stalin was amazed to find a Menshevik, Artyom Gio, in a secret hideout. “I wasn’t expecting it!” Stalin blurted out. “Haven’t you been arrested?” Just then a stranger entered. “You can talk freely,” Stalin reassured Gio. “He’s a comrade of mine.” This “comrade” turned out to be a police interpreter who then recited the list of comrades, including Sergei Alliluyev, who had been arrested that day—and warned Stalin that the police would arrest him that very night.[114]
The Okhrana’s agent “Fikus” reported that an unknown Gendarme officer visited Stalin and Mdivani to warn them about the Gendarme raid on the printing-press. As we saw, they saved the press.
So what was Stalin’s relationship with the secret police?
“Stalin was giving addresses of comrades disagreeable to him to the Gendarmes to get rid of them,” insists Arsenidze. “His comrades decided to put him on Party trial… but, at the trial meeting, Gendarmes appeared and arrested the judges and Koba.” In 1909, adds Uratadze, “the Baku Bolsheviks accused him of denouncing Shaumian to the police.” Jordania claimed that Shaumian even told him, “Stalin denounced me—no one else knew the address of my safe house.” All three of these accusers were Menshevik exiles whose stories have been widely accepted.
Then the secret police always seemed strangely confused about Stalin. The Gendarme chief in Baku, Colonel Martynov, only “discovered” that the Milkman was Soso Djugashvili in December 1909—almost six months after his escape. Was he being protected by his Tsarist controllers?
If one throws into this poisonous cauldron the accusations of betrayal against him as early as 1902, his secret-police contacts and his escapes from exile and prison, it might look plausible that he was a Tsarist agent.{194} Was the future supreme pontiff of international Marxism an unprincipled megalomaniac traitor? If Stalin was a phoney, was not the entire Soviet experiment a fraud too? And was everything he did, particularly the Great Terror, an attempt to cover up his guilt? It was a tempting theory—especially during the Cold War.
Yet the case against Stalin is actually a weak one. The Menshevik stories of Shaumian’s betrayal do not stand up. There was tension but no feud with Shaumian: the two towering Bolshevik figures in the Caucasus were “friendly but with a shadow.” During 1907–10, Shaumian was only arrested once, on 30 April 1909, when Stalin was still in Solvychegodsk. Shaumian was next arrested, on 30 September 1911, when Stalin was imprisoned in Petersburg. It is unlikely Stalin arranged either arrest.
Stalin was flexible and amoral. His Messiah-complex led him to believe that anyone opposed to him was an enemy of the cause—thus any compact was justified, no matter how Mephistophelian. Yet there is no proof that he betrayed any comrades or that he was tried by a Party court.
114
Gio’s memoirs are remarkable because they were published in the Soviet Union in 1925, just after Lenin’s death but before Stalin had established his dictatorship—virtually the only moment in Soviet history when this could have happened. The book came out in Leningrad, then the fiefdom of Zinoviev, who presumably permitted this as a warning to Stalin, with whom he was competing for Lenin’s throne. Gio reveals that the Georgian police interpreter betrayed the Tsarist state not because he was a Marxist but because he was a Georgian “nationalist.” Gio also recounts how Stalin gave him code words to contact another comrade named Kornev, who turned out to be so suspicious that he was probably a police agent. Gio believed that this Kornev had tricked Stalin, but it is equally possible that Stalin was testing or sacrificing Gio, or that he was in the process of recruiting Kornev.