Sergo set off for Russia to brief the ragged Bolshevik organization on the new appointments. The Okhrana watched the Caucasian even more closely, but he was an expert dodger of police spies. In early August, he managed to slip out of Vologda and reach Petersburg on a flying visit to meet Sergo. “Sergo gave Stalin Lenin’s directive… and Lenin’s request that he come abroad to discuss Party activities.” Here was another minor escape, but Stalin managed to return to Vologda without the spooks even realizing he had gone.
Vologda was a metropolis compared to Solvychegodsk, with 38,000 citizens, libraries, theatres, a cathedral dating from the 1580s, a house that had belonged to Peter the Great and a grand governor’s mansion. Stalin spent a month gathering funds for a longer excursion, and he read voraciously, visiting the library seventeen times. “I’d have thought you’d been strolling some other city’s streets,” his fellow exile from Solvychegodsk, Ivan Golubev, wrote teasingly, “but I… learn you’ve not budged, wallowing in semi-exile conditions. That’s sad if true. So what are you going to do now? Wait? You might go insane with idleness!”
Yet Stalin seemed to be indulging the sybarite hidden within his steely ascetic for perhaps the only time in his life. His Okhrana surveillance soon divined the reason: a runaway schoolgirl who was the live-in mistress of Stalin’s fellow exile Peter Chizhikov. Aged just sixteen, she was Pelageya Onufrieva, a pupil at the Totma Gymnasium and daughter of a prosperous Solvychegodsk smallholder. She had embarked on an affair with Chizhikov when he was exiled to Totma and eloped with him to Vologda, where she met the Caucasian. Chizhikov, who had encountered Soso in prison a few years earlier, soon fell under his spell, running his errands and raising money for his next escape. He did not seem to mind when this friendship developed into a ménage à trois with Soso.
Pelageya was just a frivolous and rebellious schoolgirl, but she somehow managed to impress the Okhrana agents with her fine clothes. They code-named her “Nariadnaya”—the Well-Dressed One, or Glamourpuss. No wonder even the obsessionally ambitious and committed Stalin was happy to waste a month in her company. “I always knew him as Josef,” she recalls. The serpent literally offered Eve the forbidden fruit: “In those days one wasn’t supposed to eat in the street but there was a shady avenue lined with trees. I went there with Stalin who often invited me… Once we sat on a bench and he offered me the fruit: ‘Eat some. No one will see you here…’”
His friend Chizhikov worked during the day at the Colonial Goods Store. As soon as he left his home to go to work at 9 a.m., the spooks watched Stalin turn up and disappear inside. “We were quite happy when we were at home,” Glamourpuss recounts, “we’d read quietly. He knew I loved literature. We talked a lot about books. We used to have lunch together, walked around town for hours and visited the library and we joked a lot. I was silly but so young.” Soso, ever the teacher, lectured her on Shakespeare (including literary criticisms of The Tempest) and the paintings of the Louvre (which he must have visited during his week in Paris). Most touchingly he poured out his heart about Kato: how he had loved her, how he had wanted to shoot himself after her death, how his friends had taken away his gun and what beautiful dresses she made—and he mentioned his son Yakov. Stalin “had lots of friends. He had good taste—despite being a man,” jokes Glamourpuss. “He talked about southern landscapes, how beautiful were the gardens, how elegant the buildings. He’d often say to me, ‘I know you’d love it in the south. Come and see it for yourself… You’ll be treated as one of the family!’”
Glamourpuss was cheeky and intelligent. Stalin was attracted to strong women, but ultimately preferred submissive housekeepers or teenagers. He undoubtedly enjoyed adolescent and teenage girls, a taste that later was to get him into serious trouble with the police. Even though the rules in Tsarist Russia were much laxer than they are today, particularly far away from the capital, this must reveal, at least, a need to dominate and control on Stalin’s part. But it was not an obsession—some of his girlfriends were older than him.
Pelageya seemed to have understood the Caucasian better than most. She was probably the only person in his life to have teased him about his strangeness; he opened up to her. Even this most thin-skinned and touchy of men enjoyed Glamourpuss’s mischief. He nicknamed her “Polya;” she called him “Oddball Osip.”
“It was a long hot summer,” she reminisces, but when it was over she felt “she would never see him again.” One senses that Stalin had women in every town at this point. He told Glamourpuss that he was engaged to another girl in St. Petersburg, later writing to her: “You know I travelled to St. Petersburg to get married, but finally I ended up in prison…” If Oddball Osip had another woman, Polya the Glamourpuss, at the centre of a ménage à trois, could hardly complain. But who was the woman in Petersburg?
Glamourpuss “always knew he was going to leave. I wanted to see him off but he wouldn’t let me, saying he was being followed.” But “just before he left, he came over that morning” for a tender parting.
“I want to give you this as a present,” he said, handing her a book, “to remember me by. It’ll interest you.”
“It certainly will,” said Glamourpuss.
“Give me something to remember you by,” asked Oddball Osip.
She gave him as a keepsake the cross that hung around her neck, but he would not take it. Instead he accepted the chain and “hung it on his watch.” She asked for a photograph of him, but Stalin, about to plunge again into his secret life, refused: “No one photographs me. Only in prison by force. One day, I’ll send you my photograph, but for now, it would just get you into trouble.”
The book he gave her was A Study of Western Literature by Kogan, a special present from an autodidactic bibliophile, dedicated:
To clever, fiery Polya
From Oddball Osip[120]
They never met again but he kept writing. His letters, reported Pelageya, “were always very witty—he knew how to be funny even in the difficult moments of life.” But when he was exiled in 1913, “I lost contact with him for ever.”
However delightful the Glamourpuss, Oddball Osip could linger no longer. At 3:45 p.m. on 6 September 1911, the Okhrana spies reported that, accompanied by Chizhikov, “the Caucasian arrived at the station with two pieces of luggage—a little trunk and a bundle, apparently of bedclothes, and boarded the train for Petersburg.” The spooks noticed that Stalin twice checked all the carriages, pretending to miss his tails.
“Djugashvili went by train Number Three under observation of agent Ilchykov,” the Vologda Okhrana telegraphed Petersburg. “I ask you to meet him. Captain Popel.” Yet Soso outwitted the reception party at the station: when he arrived at 8:40 p.m., he had shaken off the agents.
“The provincial,” sneers the snobbish Trotsky, “arrived in the territory of the capital.” Stalin first searched for Sergei Alliluyev, but he was not home. So he just strolled up and down Nevsky Prospect until he bumped into Silva Todria, his Georgian printing expert.
Just before Stalin’s arrival, Stolypin, the Russian Premier, was assassinated right in front of the Emperor’s box at the theatre in Kiev. The assassin was a rogue secret-police informer, who again personified the dangers of konspiratsia. The victim was the last great statesman of the Russian Empire.
“Dangerous times,” Todria warned Soso. “After Stolypin’s murder, the police are everywhere. Concierges check all papers.”
120
In 1944, the secret police confiscated her copy of this book along with postcards from Stalin. See the Epilogue.