The isolation was about to end. Sergo was already on his way to Vologda.
On 18 February 1912, the Vologda police spies reported that the Caucasian met “an unknown man”—surely Sergo—who announced his promotion to the Central Committee, the highest organ of the Party, a status he would hold for the rest of his life, and handed over his salary, secret addresses and codes. It was probably now that Stalin agreed with Krupskaya, chief code maker as well as Lenin’s wife, to use Gorky’s poem “Oltenian Legend,” as their code. His handwritten copy of the poem survives.
Meanwhile Lenin, back in Paris, panicked at the lack of news: “There’s no word of Ivanovich. What’s happened to him? Where is he now? How is he?” Sergo finally reported to Lenin that he had met Soso: “I made a final agreement with him. He is satisfied.”
It was time to disappear again. Whenever he wanted to vanish from Vologda, Soso bribed the local police with five gold roubles and, according to Vera Shveitzer, escaped five times.
His landlady, Gavrilova, found him packing. “Are you going away?”
He hesitated: “Yes I am.”
She said she would have to inform the police.
“Could you do it tomorrow?” he asked. She agreed.
At 2 a.m. on 29 February, his tails reported him boarding the train for Moscow without permission. But first he received a last letter from his schoolgirl. He bought another sensual postcard, showing a sculpture of a couple wildly kissing and wrote this to Glamourpuss:
Dear PG,
I got your letter today… Don’t write to the old address since none of us are there any more… I owe you a kiss for the kiss, passed on to me by Peter. Let me kiss you now. I’m not simply sending a kiss but am kiiissssing you passionately (it’s not worth kissing any other way),
So, on the last night of February 1912, Stalin surreptitiously caught the train, via Moscow, to the capital. Lenin’s new CC member was on the road.{199}
28. “Don’t Forget That Name and Be Very Wary!”
On one cold gloomy Petersburg winter day, I was studying when there was a knock at the door,” says Kavtaradze, who was attending Petersburg University while giving maths lessons to the Alliluyev sisters. “Suddenly in came Stalin. I knew he’d been exiled. He was as friendly and merry as usual, wearing a light overcoat despite the biting frost but… he wouldn’t take his coat off. ‘I’ll be here for a bit… I’ll just rest a while. I came straight from Moscow and I noticed I was being tailed in Moscow and when I got off the train, I spotted the same spook… he’s lurking right outside your place!”
“This was serious,” notes Kavtaradze. The two Georgians waited until darkness. Kavtaradze decided that there was only one way to escape: Stalin would have to dress up in drag. Kavtaradze procured some dresses and Stalin modelled them—but the look just did not work. “I could get women’s dresses,” said Kavtaradze, “but it was impossible to make Stalin look like a woman.”
The spook, reflected Stalin, “doesn’t want to arrest me—he wants to observe. So I’ll get some sleep.”
“Yes, sleep: maybe he won’t be able to take the frost. Like Napoleon’s army,” joked Kavtaradze.
“He will,” replied Soso, who slept all day. But when they emerged onto the streets, the agent was still there. “Let’s walk a little,” said Soso.
He was hungry, so they ate at Fedorov’s restaurant, but the spy reappeared. “Damn!” swore Stalin. “He pops up from nowhere!”
A cab clattered down the street. Stalin hailed the carriage and leaped on, but the spook hailed another. The galloping phaetons chased each other down Liteiny, but, realizing he was close to a safe house, Stalin jumped out of the moving cab into a snowdrift, which enveloped him completely. The spy’s galloped past, following the now empty carriage.[123]
Stalin dressed up “in the uniform of the Army Medical College and went out.” This was his favoured disguise in Petersburg that year. He stayed about a week. His new assignment was to convert the Bolshevik weekly Zvezda into a daily, Pravda (Truth).
Stalin was brought to the flat of Tatiana Slavatinskaya, aged thirty-three, a cultured and good-looking Bolshevik, an orphan who had educated herself and studied at the Conservatoire, becoming a fan of Chaliapin’s singing. One of Lenin’s covert operatives, Elena Stasova, trained her in code making. Married to a Jewish revolutionary named Lurye and mother of two children, Tatiana sheltered various Bolsheviks on the run, one of whom “brought a Caucasian with the codename ‘Vasily’ who lived with us for a while.”
She did not much like “Vasily”—Stalin’s latest alias. “Initially, he seemed too serious, too closed and shy, and his only concern was not to bother us. It was very hard to make him sleep in a bigger, more comfortable room, but on going out to work I always ordered the housemaid[124] to cook him dinner along with the children. He stayed a week and I ran his errands as messenger.” Stalin appointed her his secretary for the Duma elections. Slavatinskaya seems to have been fairly liberated, in the style of these early feminists. He started an affair with his “dear darling Tatiana” that was “well known” among Soviet grandees during Stalin’s rule.
Sometimes Stalin stayed with the Alliluyevs. The Venice of the North was a picture of “frosts, snowdrifts, icy sledge paths,” writes Anna Alliluyeva. “Its streets were filled with low Finnish sleighs decorated with ribbons and jingly bells” pulled by “stumpy little horses,” bearing “loads of laughing passengers.” Anna and her younger sister Nadya were glued to their windows longing for a ride—when Soso appeared: “Who’d like a sleigh-ride? Well, get dressed and hurry up, we’re leaving straight away!” The girls were delighted. “We all jumped up shouting with excitement,” recounts Anna. “Now we were invited”—and by none other than “Soso himself,” whose articles they loyally read. The girls knew him better now: “Usually uncommunicative, he can also laugh and joke boyishly and tell amusing stories. He sees the funny side of people and imitates them to such perfection that everyone roars with laughter.” But now he was in a hurry.
“Come on! Fedya [their brother Fyodor], Nadya! Get dressed”—and he ordered their maid, Fenya: “Get the fur coats!”
In the street, Soso called out to the driver: “How about giving us a ride!”
Stalin was in good spirits: “Every word… makes us laugh. Soso laughs with us all as the sleigh glides down Sampsonevsky Prospect past the station” with its “small steam trains.” Suddenly, Soso jumped off the sleigh and back into his secret life: “Stop, I’ll get off here, you can ride home”—and, just like that, the Bolshevik Macavity vanished into the station. Was he really having fun with the girls, or was the whole outing a cover to shake off a spook?
Soso disappeared again. The police spies lost him but guessed correctly that he would resurface in the Caucasus.{200}
On 16 March 1912, the Okhrana’s double-agent “Fikus” reported that Stalin was back in Tiflis, where he was staying with a singing teacher who worked at the Teachers’ Society School, directed by the severe Elena Stasova.[125] His hostess was told “not to ask the name of her visitor,” but Stalin, perhaps missing home, sang Georgian songs with her.
Soso met up with his playboy friend and CC member Spandarian, and with Stasova. He visited his son, Yakov, whom the Svanidzes were bringing up “as their own with our own children.” The Monoselidzes remained shocked by his callous neglect. “My nephew, having been left an orphan by his mother,” complains Sashiko, “was also almost orphaned by his father.” Soso did not stay long, rushing over to Batumi and then back to Baku.{201}
123
Kavtaradze was arrested by the Gendarmes the next day. When they showed him a photo of Stalin, he laughed because he looked “so tousled.” “Do you know him?” asked the officer. “No, he looks crazy.” “Do you know Djugashvili?” “Yes I know Soso Djugashvili, I just saw him.” “Do you know he’s a state criminal who’s very dangerous and on the run?” “Well, you know we Georgians always know each other…” Kavtaradze was released.
124
The housemaid was an Estonian girl who later married Kalinin, becoming the first lady of the USSR before being arrested during Stalin’s Terror while her husband remained head of state. See
125
Now known as “Comrade Zelma,” Stasova was the granddaughter of the architect to the Emperors Alexander I and Nicholas I and daughter of a noble lawyer who worked in the Senate, a herald at Alexander II’s coronation: she had much in common with those cultured nobles Lenin and Krupskaya. She knew Stalin from Baku and was a specialist in secret work, often involved in keeping Party funds. Stasova was so humourless and prissy that Stalin laughed at her. She later became one of Lenin’s secretaries. After Lenin’s death, when Krupskaya opposed him, Stalin half jokingly threatened to appoint Stasova as his widow instead. She did not seek high office after Lenin’s death, almost disappearing, one of the very few Old Bolsheviks to survive the Terror. She emerged as a revered antique in Khrushchev’s reign, living on into Brezhnev’s, and dying in 1966.