It was probably now that Tsintsadze, as Stalin recalled after the Second World War, gave the gangsters his pep talk in a private room at the Tamamshev Caravanserai on Yerevan Square before they rode up the Kadzhorskoe Highway.
On 24 September, Kamo and Tsintsadze, with Kupriashvili and about eighteen gunmen, ambushed the mail coach three miles outside Tiflis. The highwaymen tossed bombs at the police and Cossacks: three policemen and a postilion were killed. A fourth policeman was wounded but opened fire on the bank robbers. The holdup escalated into a brutal fire-fight. The gunmen failed to grab the money; the Cossacks rallied. When the Outfit eventually retreated, the Cossacks gave chase but Tsintsadze and Kupriashvili, both crack shots, covered their retreat, picking off seven Cossacks in a galloping battle down the Kadzhorskoe Highway.
It was the last bow of the Outfit. Kamo was tracked down to his hideout with eighteen of his gangsters. They were arrested. Kamo received four death sentences.
“I’m resigned to death,” Kamo wrote to Tsintsadze, “I’m absolutely calm. On my grave there should already be grass growing six feet high. One can’t escape death for ever. One must die one day. But I’ll try my luck once more and perhaps one day, we’ll laugh at our enemies again…”{206} This seemed highly unlikely.[130]
Soso did not linger in Tiflis.
30. Travels with the Mysterious Valentina
Stalin was back in Petersburg, editing Pravda and staying with Molotov and Tatiana Slavatinskaya, within days of the failed robbery. He poured out articles,[131] drafted the Manifesto and presided over the nomination for the Duma elections. After supervising the selection of the Bolshevik candidates in Petersburg in mid-October, he oversaw Malinovsky’s nomination in Moscow.
Soso’s life on the run was an exhausting series of “sleepless nights… He flitted from one place to another, crossing street after street to confuse the Okhrana, making his way through back alleys,” explains Anna Alliluyeva. “If happening to pass a workman’s café,” he “would sit there over a cup of tea until 2 a.m.,” or if noticed by a Gendarme, “he’d pretend to be tipsy and dive into a café, sitting it out until dawn with the cab-drivers amid the stench of cheap tobacco before coming to sleep in a friend’s place”—especially the Alliluyev apartment with the sensual Olga and her lively daughters. Stalin often “dropped in,” sitting on the sofa in their dining-room “looking very tired.”
The girls were always delighted to see him; their mother, Olga, looked after him. “If you feel like taking a rest, Soso,” said Olga, “go and lie on the bed. It’s no good trying to catch a nap in this bedlam…” Reading between the lines of Anna’s accounts, Soso still had a special relationship with Olga, at least in their devotion to the cause. When leaving their place, he would say to Olga, “Come out with me.” Olga “didn’t ask any questions. She put on her coat and went out with Stalin. Having plotted their course of action, they hired a cab and drove off. Stalin made a sign and Mother got out. He was evidently shaking the police off his tracks. Stalin continued his journey alone.”
Stalin invited Olga to the Mariinsky Theatre: “Please, Olga, let’s go to the Theatre immediately—you’ll just be in time for the opening performance.” But, just before the play, he added, “I did so want to see a play even just once, but I can’t.” Olga had to go on her own and deliver a message to a box at the Mariinsky.
On 25 October 1912, six Bolsheviks and six Mensheviks were elected to the Imperial Duma—not a bad result. Karlo Chkheidze, the Menshevik whom Stalin had outraged in Batumi in 1901, was elected Chairman of the SD faction with Malinovsky as his deputy. Among the “Bolshevik Six,” the Okhrana had managed to get two agents elected to the Duma, quite an achievement of konspiratsia. They took the Okhrana right into Lenin’s inner circle.
In Pravda, Stalin pushed for conciliation with the Mensheviks. When the Bolsheviks planned a demonstration outside the Duma, the Mensheviks persuaded them to abandon it. This alarmed Lenin, who bombarded Stalin with articles attacking his conciliatory policy. Remarkably, Stalin turned down forty-seven of Lenin’s articles. Lenin, now in Cracow, summoned Stalin and the Six. “Comrade Stalin,” remembered one of the Bolshevik Six, “immediatedly stated that the Bolshevik delegates had to visit Lenin abroad.”
On 28 October, the spooks observed Stalin visiting his friend Kavtaradze. They followed them when they went to eat in Fedorov’s restaurant, a favourite haunt, but after dinner the police agents realized that he had disappeared. They searched for Soso, but he had vanished.{207}
Lenin ordered Valentina Lobova, another of the liberated, capable girls of the Bolshevik generation, to accompany Stalin. She commissioned Lenin’s “foreign minister” and secret fixer Alexander Shotman to get Stalin to Cracow “with maximum speed and absolute security. This is a directive from Lenin.” Stalin “had arrived in Petersburg in the company of Valentina Lobova,” in Shotman’s tactful words, “staying in a hotel as a Persian citizen with a good Persian passport in his pocket.”
Shotman explained the covert routes to Cracow—the riskier southerly route via Abo, or the longer, safer route by foot across the Swedish border at Haparanda. Stalin chose the Abo route. Then Stalin set off with Valentina Lobova, smuggled out of Petersburg in a covered cart. They caught the train to Finland from Levashovo Station, using Russian passports. In Finland, Eino Rakhia, later Lenin’s bodyguard, delivered a Finnish passport and accompanied the couple to the Abo steam-ferry. “Two policeman verified documents… Although Comrade Stalin… did not at all resemble a Finn, everything happily went off without a hitch.” Stalin and Valentina boarded the ferry across the Baltic to Germany.
This was another of Soso’s mysterious relationships. Valentina, code-named “Comrade Vera,” was a beauty married to a Bolshevik who was yet another Okhrana mole: the Party had never been more riddled with traitors. We do not know if she was aware that her husband was a doubleagent, but she was totally trusted by Lenin. Shotman’s memoir shows that Soso (on Persian papers, name unknown) had been travelling with Valentina for some time. They first came to Helsinki, sharing a room in a guesthouse, in “late summer,” possibly September, right after his escape from Narym. Shotman implies that they were together. Travelling hundreds of miles after September 1912, they were apparently lovers, one of those little affairs between comrades thrown together on dangerous missions. When Valentina’s husband was later executed as a traitor, it must have contributed to Stalin’s growing distrust of perfidious wives.[132]
130
Once again, Kamo cheated the noose, benefiting from the broad amnesty of Nicholas II on the three hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty in 1913. Kamo remained in jail for five years but lived to meet up again with Stalin and play out the ultimate insane violence after the Revolution. See the Epilogue. Of the female gangsters, Anneta and Patsia died of TB, as did many of the others. By the end of the 1930s, only Alexandra Darakhvelidze and Bachua Kupriashvili survived to leave their memoirs.
131
His articles are revealing of his cynical view of diplomacy (he paraphrases Talleyrand) and his belief in doublespeak (long before Orwell coined the word): “When bourgeois diplomats prepare for war, they shout loudly about ‘peace.’ A diplomat’s words must contradict his deeds—otherwise what sort of diplomat is he? Fine words are a mask to conceal shady deeds. A sincere diplomat is like dry water. Or wooden iron.”
132
Her husband, journalist Alexander Lobov, was shot in 1918 as an Okhrana agent. She was cleared but died of TB in 1924. Shotman, who remained close to Lenin into the 1920s, was executed by Stalin in 1939.