Three months later, the Gendarmes decided to free her, but “in view of [Stalin’s] tenacious participation in the revolutionary parties and his high position, despite all previous administrative punishments, and his two escapes from exile, I propose the extreme penalty of five years’ Siberian exile.” That was the maximum. Unfortunately, the corrupt Captain Zaitsev had just been dismissed and the new ranking officer was less flexible.
With Soso stuck in prison, his comrades procured the phlegm of a prisoner with TB and bribed a doctor to get him transferred to the prison hospital, whence he appealed to the governor of Baku with a romantic request:
In view of my diagnosed pulmonary tuberculosis… I humbly request Your Excellency to… examine my health, put me under less restraint and expedite the accomplishment of my case.
I ask Your Excellency to allow me to marry Stefania Leandrovna Petrovskaya, resident of Baku.
Stefania, now released, must have visited him in prison and received a proposal because the next day, Soso wrote again, this time calling her his “wife”: “I have learned from my wife who visited the Gendarmes Department that Your Excellency considers it necessary to deport me to Yakutsk. I do not understand such a severe measure and wonder if insufficient knowledge of my case might have led to some misunderstanding…”
These appeals were against revolutionary rules, but Stalin’s wheedling lies did not move Colonel Martynov, who still recommended five years. But the liberal viceroy’s office in Tiflis watered down the punishment. On 13 September, Stalin was sentenced to complete his exile in Solvychegodsk and banned for five years from the Caucasus. Though he would return again to Baku, the Tsar’s officials ironically forced Stalin to escape the periphery and concentrate on the greater stage of Russia itself.
On 31 August, the deputy prosecutor wrote to the Baku governor: “Jailed prisoner J. V. Djugashvili petitions to allow him to marry Baku resident Stefania Petrovskaya. Does Your Excellency have any objections to my allowing Djugashvili’s request?” Whether out of sloppy paperwork, bureaucratic mistake or deliberate malice, it was only on 23 September that Bailov Prison’s governor received this: “Prisoner Djugashvili is permitted to marry Stefania Petrovskaya: the prisoner is to be informed. The ceremony will be in the presence of the Governor in the Prison Church.”
When the warders brought this joyous news to Stalin’s cell, he was gone: on that very day, “23 September 1910, Josef Djugashvili was deported to Vologda Province.” By the end of October, he was back in Solvychegodsk. Not only did he not marry his fiancée and unofficial wife, he never saw her again.{196}
Solvychegodsk[117] had not improved in his absence. There were fewer exiles and the police regime under the ridiculous River Cock was tighter than ever. There was even less to do. We do not know if Stalin ever thought again about his fiancée in Baku, but he was to console himself for the dreariness of exile with another bout of skirt-chasing that led to a forgotten semi-official marriage, and an illegitimate son.
“It was bad living in Solvychegodsk,” recalls a fellow exile named Serafima Khoroshenina, then aged about twenty-two, a well-educated teacher’s daughter from Perm Province. “The police surveillance was bearable but the exiles aren’t alive—they’ve actually died. Everyone lives inside themselves… with nothing to say. There wasn’t even common entertainment so the exiles drowned their sorrows in drink.” She might have added that the other main pastime, after feuding with other exiles and hitting the bottle, was fornication. After the Second World War when the Soviet dictator was discussing a diplomatic sex scandal with the British Ambassador, Stalin laughed knowingly that “such questions arise from boredom.”
He first stayed with the Grigorov family. While he was there, he started an affair with the young teacher Serafima Khoroshenina. They moved in together, staying in a single room in the house of a young widow, Maria Kuzakova.
Stalin was not the only one who found sexual adventure as a consolation. He spent much time with a flamboyant Menshevik in a white suit named Lezhnev, “who had been deported to this backwater from Vologda Town because he had seduced the Town Prosecutor’s wife,” according to their fellow exile Ivan Golubev. “He used to tell us about his Vologda adventures and it was impossible not to fall about with laughter—Stalin almost died laughing!”
However much he was carousing in the Kuzakova household, Soso’s mind was elsewhere. Always green-fingered, he started to plant pine trees. And he read frantically, history books and more novels including those by Tolstoy, whose politics he loathed but whose literature he admired. But he was soon ready to escape, bored to tears and desperate to get news of developments from Lenin.
On 10 December, a letter arrived from the Bolshevik Centre. Stalin replied, sending “warm greetings to Lenin,” whom he backed as “the only correct” one against the “Liquidationist trash” and “Trotsky’s base lack of principle… Lenin’s a shrewd fellow who knows a thing or two.” But “the immediate task, which will stand no delay, is to organize a central [Russian] group which would command all illegal, semi-legal and legal work… Call it whatever you like. It doesn’t matter. Yet it’s as urgent as the bread of life itself. It would begin the Party’s revival.” As for himself, “I have six months left to serve. After that I’m at your service,” but “if the need is urgent, I can weigh my anchor immediately…” He was ready to escape—but needed the funds.
Faced with the SD meltdown inside Russia, Lenin tried one last time to reunite with the Mensheviks. Stalin, half-Conciliator, half-Leninist, approved. When the wooing came to naught, Lenin returned to his natural state of exuberant feuding.
“Dressed in a beaverskin hat,” Soso presided over secret meetings of the seven exiles in a dovecote. He was “often very cheerful, laughing and singing in his magical mountain voice,” recalled Ivan Golubev, “but he despised toadies.” Once, he revealed a truth about himself: “We must remain illegal until the Revolution because going legal would mean turning into a normal person.” Stalin had no wish to be a “normal person.” In normal life, his peculiarities would have been intolerable, but in the revolutionary underground (and later the idiosyncratic, paranoiac and conspiratorial Soviet leadership), they were virtues of a “Knight of the Grail.”
“I’m suffocating here without active work, literally suffocating,” he wrote on 24 January 1911, in another letter to a Moscow comrade, whom he hailed: “A Caucasian Soso is writing to you—remember me from Baku and Tiflis in 1904.” The tedium was tormenting him. He talked constantly about escape. Seething about the factional time-wasting of the feuding émigrés, he vented his disdain for both sides, even Lenin: “Everybody heard about the storm in a teacup abroad: the bloc of Lenin-Plekhanov on one hand and the bloc of Trotsky-Martov-Bogdanov on the other. As far as I know, the workers favour the first bloc but generally they disdain those abroad…”
Stalin’s outburst soon reached Lenin in exile: he was displeased. At the time, Lenin was holding a Party school at Longjumeau near Paris, and had invited Sergo to study there. Sergo talked up his ally Stalin. One day, Lenin and Sergo were strolling the boulevards.
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Stalin’s presence as an exile would return to haunt this region. In 1940, he ordered the construction of a giant steel-mill in Cherepovets because he remembered it from his Solvychegodsk exile, even though it was totally unsuitable: the nearest iron-ore and coal deposits were over 1,000 miles away. But his advisers were too frightened to tell him. The Second World War delayed construction, but building started in 1949. Due to its inconvenient location, it is still known as “Stalin’s Belch.”