Stalin’s secret-police contacts are not as suspicious as they seem. When he visited Tiflis for a short conference in November 1909, we know, ironically from “Fikus,” the Okhrana agent within the Bolsheviks, that “Due to the efforts of Koba (Soso)—Josef Djugashvili, who came from Baku—the conference decided to arrange that Party members should infiltrate different state institutions and collect intelligence for the Party.” So Stalin was in charge of the Party’s intelligence/counterintelligence—the penetration of the secret police.
It was his job to groom Gendarme or Okhrana officers, to generate tip-offs about traitors and police raids, and to engineer quick releases for arrested comrades. If one reads them carefully, every one of the stories of Stalin’s secret-police meetings, even the most hostile ones, reveals that he was actually receiving intelligence, not giving it. Some contacts, like the police interpreter, were sympathizers; most just wanted money.
The secret world is always a marketplace. The Caucasian police were particularly venal, and prices for releasing comrades were well known. The Bailov prison governor charged 150 roubles per prisoner to substitute a stand-in.[115] In Baku, the deputy head of the Gendarmerie, Captain Fyodor Zaitsev, was notorious. “Soon all our comrades were released,” remembers Sergo, “by means of small payments to Captain Zaitsev, who readily accepted bribes.” Shibaev, the Baku oil baron, paid Zaitsev 700 roubles to free Shaumian. Captain Zaitsev was almost certainly the senior Gendarme secretly meeting Stalin. In April 1910, Zaitsev’s venality caught up with him, and he was dismissed.
The money flowed both ways. Virtually all Okhrana agents were paid, but Stalin received no such mysterious income. Even when he was flush with bank-robbery cash, he spent little on himself and was usually penniless, in marked contrast to the real Okhrana agents, who were lavishly rewarded bon viveurs.
The secret police also ensured that their agents were virtually always at liberty: they wanted value for money. Yet Stalin spent only one and a half years at liberty between his arrest in 1908 and 1917. After 1910, he was free for just ten months.
The muddle of the Tsarist secret police is a major plank in the case against Stalin, and the flimsiest. Such mistakes were universal, not restricted to Stalin. The security agencies had totally infiltrated the Bolsheviks, but no organization before computers could have digested their millions of reports and card indexes. Indeed the Okhrana were remarkably successful, emerging well from comparisons with, say, today’s generously funded U.S. security agencies in the age of computers and electronic surveillance.
As for Stalin’s many escapes from exile (and there are more to come), “Those who didn’t escape,” explained one secret policeman, “did not want to, for personal reasons.” Stalin’s covert craft, feline elusiveness, and use of intermediaries made him especially hard to catch; his ruthlessness discouraged witnesses.
Finally, the evidence, in the many surviving secret-police archives, is overwhelming that Stalin was not a Tsarist agent—unless this is overturned by some decisive document[116] lurking undiscovered in provincial Okhrana archives, missed by Stalin himself, his own secret police, his many enemies and the armies of historians who have searched in vain for a smoking gun for almost a century.
Stalin was supremely well qualified for this moral no-man’s-land. On each of his nine or more arrests, the secret police would routinely have tried to turn him into their double-agent. Simultaneously, Stalin, that master of human frailty, would have been assiduously probing, seeking weak or venal policemen to become his agents.
When he did recruit an informer from the secret police, who was playing whom? It is likely that some of the secret policemen were double-crossing Stalin in the spirit of konspiratsia, passing him the names of innocent Bolsheviks as “traitors” in order to sow destructive paranoia within the Party—and protect their real agents. This explains why most of the Baku “traitors” named by Stalin were innocent, while the real Tsarist agents, “Fikus” and “Mikheil,” remained unsuspected.
Yet ultimately Stalin was a devout Marxist “of semi-Islamic fervour,” allowing no friend or family to stand between him and his mission. He regarded himself as an undiscovered but remarkable leader of the working class—a “Knight of the Grail,” in Spandarian’s phrase. As far as we know, he never wavered from this mission even in the worst of times—and in this he was almost unique.
Yet this cesspit of duplicity and espionage helps explain some of the craziness of Soviet history. Here is the origin of the paranoiac Soviet mind-set, the folly of Stalin’s mistrust of the warnings of Hitler’s invasion plans in 1941 and the bloody frenzy of his Terror.
The Okhrana may have failed to prevent the Russian Revolution, but they were so successful in poisoning revolutionary minds that, thirty years after the fall of the Tsars, the Bolsheviks were still killing each other in a witch hunt for nonexistent traitors.{195}
In the spring of 1910, the Milkman was such a master of evasion that the secret police could no longer cope. “The impossibility of his continued surveillance,” reported the Baku Gendarme commander Colonel Martynov, “makes necessary his detention; all the agents have become known to him and even newly assigned agents failed, while the Milkman managed both to deceive the surveillance and to expose it to his comrades, thus spoiling the entire operation. The Milkman mainly lives with his concubine Stefania Petrovskaya.”
On 23 March 1910, Colonel Martynov arrested the Milkman, now using the alias “Zakhar Melikiants,” and “the noblewoman of Kherson Province, Stefania Petrovskaya.” The couple were interrogated separately in Bailov Prison. The Milkman first denied having a relationship with Stefania. But he then requested permission to marry her. Soon Stalin was calling her “my wife.”
PART THREE
26. Two Lost Fiancées and a Pregnant Peasant
Stalin at first pretended he had never used the name Totomiants, and insisted that he could not have committed any crimes during the 1905 Revolution because he had been in London for a year—though he admitted his escape from exile. When Lieutenant Podolsky asked him about Stefania, Soso, now thirty, admitted meeting her in Solvychegodsk, but “I never cohabited with her,” he said. Whether this was clandestine craft, caddish abandonment or chivalrous care for her reputation, he was capable of all three. But she did not deny him. Four days earlier, Stefania, aged twenty-four, had told Podolsky, “Yes, I know Djugashvili. I’m living with him.”
115
Sometimes the police set the price too high. “My dear,” wrote an unknown Bolshevik, “unfortunately I cannot help you. The official asks 800 roubles for cancellation abroad [this meant going abroad instead of into Siberian exile] for Yakov Mikhailovich [Sverdlov]. Where to get this sum?”
116
A major piece of evidence that Stalin was an Okhrana agent was a probable forgery, the so-called Eremin Letter, that appeared in the 1920s and was published by Life magazine in the 1950s, forming the backbone of the conspiracy-theory books by I. D. Levine and E. E. Smith. Colonel Eremin was indeed the head of the Tiflis Okhrana from February 1908. The letter was clearly drafted by someone who knew a lot about Stalin and the Okhrana, but it contained a series of mistakes of detail. While appreciating Stalin’s amorality, it also grasped his devotion to the cause, claiming that he was an unsatisfactory agent because in the end he was a fanatical Marxist. When the Eremin Letter was published in Life after Stalin’s death, his successor, First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, and the Politburo ordered the KGB Chairman, General Serov, to analyse its veracity. His investigations, recently found in the archives, also conclude that it was a forgery. As for the theory that the Great Terror was Stalin’s effort to suppress evidence of his Okhrana links, The Secret File of Joseph Stalin by Roman Brackman (2001) puts the argument robustly.