“Sergo, do you recognize the phrase ‘storm in a teacup’?”
“Vladimir Illich,” replied Sergo, knowing that Lenin had somehow heard of Stalin’s letter, “Koba’s our friend. A lot of things connect us.”
“I know,” said Lenin. “I also remember him well. But the Revolution’s not yet won. Its interests must come before personal likes and dislikes. You say Koba’s our comrade as if you mean he’s a Bolshevik and won’t let us down. But do you close your eyes to inconsistency? Such nihilistic jokes… reveal Koba’s immaturity as a Marxist.”
Lenin fired a shot across Stalin’s bows, but soon forgave “Soso of the Caucasus.” Soon afterwards, the Menshevik Uratadze told Lenin about Stalin’s expulsion in Baku. “It’s not worth ascribing too much significance to such things,” answered Lenin, laughing it off. That prompted Uratadze to sneak to him about Stalin’s brutal outrages. “That,” said Lenin, “is exactly the sort of person I need.”
The escape funds—seventy roubles—arrived in Solvychegodsk, but they were almost instantly stolen from Stalin. The money was telegraphed to an exiled student in Vologda named Ivanian. It was usual to despatch such funds to a third party because otherwise exiles lost their allowances. But there was always the risk of theft.
In late January to mid-February, Stalin invented a medical appointment in order to get to the provincial capital, planning to drop by Ivanian’s place, collect the money and catch the train to Petersburg. But the student had other ideas. When Stalin reached Vologda, Ivanian moved him to the house of another exile, Count Alexei Dorrer. First, however, according to Stalin, “Ivanian didn’t pass me the money but just showed me the telegram about sending it (with various words obliterated…). He himself couldn’t explain either the ‘loss’ of the money or the missing words in the telegram.”
Soso, according to some accounts, nonetheless took the train to Petersburg, undeterred by the lost money. After walking around all day exhausted, he noticed a pharmacy bearing the Georgian name Lordkipanidze, staggered inside and confessed he was an escapee. The Georgian took pity on his compatriot, hiding and feeding him. Stalin was always amazed how complete strangers helped him.
But a fuming Stalin had to return to Solvychegodsk—and he never forgot Ivanian, “guffawing about the ‘bandit who stole the money and when I met the rascal after the Revolution, he had the nerve to ask me for help.’” If Ivanian really did steal Stalin’s money, it was an act of astonishing courage—and folly. Still protesting his innocence, he was shot in 1937.[118]
“I also used to hit the bottle,” Serafima Khoroshenina writes laconically. Perhaps it was the drinking-bout to recover from this frustrating interlude that led Stalin to formalize his relations with her. Some time before 23 February, he and Serafima Khoroshenina registered as cohabiting partners, a sort of civil marriage (because only religious marriage existed in the Orthodox Empire). It is an alliance entirely lost or omitted from Stalin’s biography.
The couple were not to enjoy their blissful honeymoon for long. “On 23 February, by order of the Governor of Vologda Province, Serafima Khoroshenina was despatched to serve her time in Nikolsk.” Such were the caprices of Tsarist Autocracy—she was not even given time to bid goodbye to her partner. But she left Stalin a farewell note. To paraphrase Wilde: to lose one fiancée almost on the day of the wedding may be regarded as a misfortune but to lose a new “wife” a week afterwards looks like carelessness. Merry word had spread of this sudden alliance, regarded as a semi-marriage, because a Bolshevik named A. P. Smirnov cheekily probed him in a letter that inquired: “I’ve heard you got married again.”
No sooner was Serafima out of his bed than his landlady, Maria Kuzakova, took her place. “He was a very polite lodger,” she recalls. “Quiet and gentle. Always in his black fedora and autumn coat. He spent most of his time at home reading and writing, and I could hear the floor creaking at night because he liked to pace as he worked.” One day she asked him his age.
“Guess,” he said.
“Forty?”
“No, I’m twenty-nine,” he laughed. Kuzakova, whose husband had been killed in the Russo-Japanese War, had three marauding children. “Sometimes they made such an unbearable rumpus that he’d open the door smiling and he’d sing with them.” It is hard to believe Soso was that good-tempered, but Maria became devoted to him, listening to his stories of the seminary.
River Cock, perhaps discovering his near escape, intensified his searches of Stalin’s room, which infuriated Kuzakova. The police knocked on the windows in the middle of the night. This woke the children, who sobbed while Stalin watched with absolute calm. They confiscated some letters from Serafima, including her farewell note, but he continued to meet up for picnics and parties to discuss politics with the other exiles. This irked Zivilev, but Stalin got his revenge. “Once, among the promenading public,” remembers Golubev, “Stalin gave him such a dressing-down that he became terrified of bumping into Stalin, who used to joke that he hardly saw him.” Indeed Kuzakova says, “I’d never seen the police so afraid of one man.”
Stalin was now so close to the end of his two-year sentence that there was no point in escaping, however much he was “suffocating.” He was bored enough to attend the local theatre, for which he was fined twenty-five kopecks. Presumably, Maria Kuzakova was another consolation. By the time he left, it seems she was pregnant with his child. According to her family, she told him she was expecting. He claimed he could not marry but promised to send money, which of course he never did.
On 25 May, River Cock arrested Stalin for attending a meeting of other revolutionaries, sentencing him to three days in the local jail. But Soso had survived his full term. When he was released on 26 June, he never even returned to bid goodbye to his pregnant landlady. “She came home and found her tenant and his stuff gone and only the rent on the table under a napkin.” This was the reason that locals were discouraged from having affairs with exiles: they tended to leave suddenly.[119]
On 6 July 1911, Soso travelled by steamer down the river to Kotlas and thence to Vologda, where he was ordered to reside for two months. He was under Okhrana surveillance from the moment he settled at various addresses in Vologda. Now the police spies gave him a new code name—“the Caucasian.”
His prolific skirt-chasing was not over. Under the eyes of the Okhrana’s spooks, the Caucasian passed the time in the seduction of a saucy schoolgirl who was the mistress of one of his comrades. When it suited him, he borrowed both the man’s girlfriend and his passport.{197}
27. The Central Committee and “Glamourpuss” the Schoolgirl
I am ready. The rest is up to you,” Stalin wrote to Lenin once he was settled in Vologda, but he wanted to make sure that henceforth he was assigned to the centre. “I want to work but I’d work only in Petersburg or Moscow. I’m free again!”
Stalin treated his own feuds with lethal seriousness, but still sneered at Lenin’s émigré rows. “Koba wrote that he can’t be bothered to bark at the Liquidators or Vperod [the factions of Krasin and Gorky respectively, both opposed to Lenin], because he’ll only mock those who are barking,” wrote one Bolshevik to his comrades in Paris—where Lenin probably heard about Stalin’s latest “immaturity.” Nonetheless, in Paris at the end of May, the Central Committee (CC) appointed a Russian Organizational Committee, with Sergo as a member and Stalin as a special travelling envoy, a promotion soon known to the Okhrana.
118
In the early 1920s, Ivanian had the misfortune to literally bump into Stalin in Moscow and he apparently did ask for his help. On 7 June 1926, when he was already the dominant Soviet leader, Stalin was consulted on Ivanian, then an official with the Commissariat of Internal Trade. “In response to your inquiry, I notify you of the following facts that you need to know,” Stalin wrote in his characteristic numbered paragraphs. Point Six concluded: “Later after I went abroad, I received all the Central Committee documents proving that 70 roubles had been sent to me… [and] the money was not lost but received by the addressee in Vologda.” Ivanian was expelled from the Party but reinstated after Old Bolsheviks interceded for him. When Stalin unleashed the Terror, the Transcaucasian boss and secret policeman Beria pursued him. Ivanian wrote desperately to the dictator: “I still declare I had nothing to do with the 70 roubles… Please help clear my name.” He was ironically exiled back to Vologda, then transported to Tiflis and executed.
119
The son, Constantine, was born after Stalin’s departure. Kuzakova left memoirs during the dictatorship that naturally did not contain a confession of their affair., but on balance, it seems that the baby was Stalin’s son. The dates on the birth certificate do not tally, but, as with Yakov Djugashvili and indeed Stalin’s own movable birthday, such documents were often pre-dated or forward-dated. Such events were in any case registered very casually in those days, especially in tiny villages far from Petersburg. Soso made no attempt to meet the child, but, unusually, the boy was later brought to Moscow, given a favoured job in the Central Committee apparat, and protected. He had an interesting career. Given the mother’s insistence, Stalin’s acquiescence in the child’s later career, and his wife Nadya Alliluyeva’s knowledge of the affair, it seems probable the dictator knew Constantine was his son. See the Epilogue.