The pair caught the train to Cracow in Galicia, a province of the Dual Monarchy of the Habsburg Emperor-King Franz-Josef.{208}
Lenin adored Cracow. The Galician capital was an ancient Polish city. The sarcophagi of the Polish kings lay in the Royal Castle. And it was here that the Jagellonian University had been founded in 1364.
Lenin, Krupskaya, and her mother shared an apartment at 49 Lubomirski Road with CC member Zinoviev, his wife and son, Stepan. Lenin and Zinoviev formed the Party’s Foreign Bureau with Krupskaya as Secretary. Cracow crackled with political intrigue, and reminded Lenin of home. “Unlike exile in Paris or Switzerland,” said Krupskaya, “there was a close connection with Russia”—4,000 of its 150,000 inhabitants were exiles from the Russian Empire, mainly Poles. “Illich liked Cracow very much. It was almost Russia.”
Lenin enjoyed himself ice-skating, while Krupskaya did the shopping in the ancient Jewish Quarter, where prices were lower. “Illich praised the Polish sourmilk and corn whisky.” He played hide-and-seek with Zinoviev’s son under the furniture. “Stop interfering, we’re playing,” he would say, dismissing interruptions—but he was eagerly awaiting Stalin and the Six.
Arriving in the first week of November, Stalin met up with the Lenins, sleeping on the sofa in their kitchen. Stalin, Malinovsky and another Duma deputy, Muranov, were charmed and berated by Lenin, who vigorously argued against any reunion or conciliation with the Mensheviks: his Bolsheviks had to remain a separate party.
Lenin may have been a highly educated nobleman but, with simple joviality and iron will, he was adept at handling tough men of action. He welcomed Stalin and put him at his ease: food brought them closer. Krupskaya served sausagey “German” food, which Stalin suffered for two days but then could not resist saying to Lenin: “I’m hungry—I crave shashlik!” Lenin agreed, “Me too, I’m ravenous, but I’m afraid of offending Nadya. Have you got money? Come on, let’s go eat somewhere…” Yet they disagreed on tactics. It was one of the many occasions when Lenin was more hard-line than Stalin, who grumbled that “Illich recommends a hardline policy for the Six, a policy of threatening the majority of the faction [Mensheviks] but Illich will give way…”
After ten days, Stalin returned to Petersburg, probably on apolupaska pass, that allowed families with relatives over the border to cross back and forth. He thought Lenin clumsily out of touch and remained an obstinate Conciliator; Lenin considered removing Stalin from Pravda.{209} When the new Duma convened, Malinovsky read out a manifesto, probably written by Stalin, that was friendly to their estranged Menshevik brethren. In defiance of Lenin, Stalin even secretly met up with Jordania and Jibladze, those long-standing Menshevik enemies.[133]
Lenin bombarded Stalin with demands for another trip to Cracow to discuss the national question—and the Pravda problem. First Krupskaya tried to lure Stalin to Cracow to save him from arrest: “Kick Vasiliev [Stalin] out as soon as possible, otherwise we won’t save him. We need him and he’s already done his main job.” Stalin wriggled out of the trip, citing his health.
“To K.St. Dear friend,” Krupskaya wrote to Stalin, on 9/22 December, for the first time using an abbreviation of his new name, Koba Stalin. “It seems you aren’t planning to come here… If so, we protest against your decision… We absolutely insist on your visit here… regardless of your health. We demand your presence categorically. You have no right to act differently.” Stalin prepared his trip, again with Lobova. Lenin and Krupskaya were delighted: “We hope Vasia [Stalin] and Vera [Valentina] are coming soon with the children [the Duma Six].”
On 15 December, the Duma broke for Christmas.{210} Stalin and Valentina left for Cracow,[134] probably taking the most direct but riskier route. On the train westwards, two passengers were reading aloud from a nationalist newspaper. “Why do you read such rubbish!” Stalin shouted at them. He and Valentina disembarked at a Polish frontier-town on the Russian-Austrian border and prepared to cross on foot—like smugglers.
This was to be Stalin’s longest ever trip abroad—and would bring him to Vienna, that crossroads of civilization, on the eve of the Great War.
31. Vienna, 1913: The Wonderful Georgian, the Austrian Artist and the Old Emperor
Stalin knew no one at the small frontier-town, but he was an expert at the art of riding the random. He walked the streets until a Polish cobbler asked him: “You’re a stranger?”
“My father was a cobbler in Georgia,” replied Stalin, knowing that the Georgians and Poles shared the chains of Russia’s Prison of Nations. “I must cross the border.” The Pole offered to take him, accepting no payment. Telling this story after the Revolution, Stalin paused, “as if trying to peer into the past,” then added: “I’d like to know where that man is now and what happened to him. What a pity I forgot his name and can’t trace him.” Like many of those who helped Stalin in his youth, the cobbler may well have wished he had buried the Georgian in the forests between empires. Stalin never mentioned that he had a companion at the time, Valentina Lobova.
Across the border in Polish Galicia, Stalin was desperate to get to Lenin, but “I was terribly hungry.” He went into the station restaurant in Trzebinia, where he soon made a mockery of himself. He summoned the Polish waiter in Russian. “The waiter carted around lots of food,” but Stalin was ignored until he lost his temper: “This is scandalous! Everyone else has been served except me!” The Pole did not serve his soup; Stalin had to fetch it himself. “In my fury, I threw the plate on the floor, flung a rouble at the waiter, and flew out!” He was ravenous by the time he reached the Lenins.
We’d hardly greeted each other when I burst out,
“Lenin, give me something to eat at once. I’m half-dead. I’ve had nothing to eat since yesterday evening.”
“Why didn’t you eat at Trzebinia? There’s a good restaurant there.”
“The Poles wouldn’t give me anything to eat,” said Stalin.
“What a fool you are, Stalin!” laughed Lenin. “Didn’t you know Poles regard Russian as the language of oppression?”{211}
Lenin must have wondered at this blindness—or “greater Russian chauvinism”—in his supposed “expert” on nationalities, but Stalin would adopt a deeply Russian hostility to any sort of Polish independence.[135]
The two men bonded as never before. “They met me in such a hospitable manner,” Stalin reported in old age. “He [Lenin] wouldn’t let me go anywhere, he persuaded me to stay with his family; I had breakfast, lunch and supper there. I broke the established rule only twice: I warned Krupskaya that I’d be out for dinner and visited the old parts of Cracow where there were lots of cafés.” Stalin’s favourite restaurant was Hawelka, which still stands on the central Market Square. When Stalin dined out, Lenin was concerned.
“Listen, old chap, that’s twice you’ve dined out—aren’t we treating you right?”
“No, Comrade, I’m delighted with everything, but I feel uneasy that you provide everything.”
“But you’re our guest,” insisted Lenin. “How was dinner in your restaurant?”
“The food was fine but the beer was excellent.”
“Ah, now I understand,” answered Lenin. “You miss your beer. Now you’ll have beer at home too,” and “he asked his mother-in-law to provide two or three bottles of beer for the guest every day.” Stalin was again touched by Lenin’s solicitude.
134
There has been much debate about Stalin’s two journeys to Cracow: he himself told many stories about crossing the border. (The old tyrant told the story about the border-crossing and Lenin and the food to his favourite youngster, Yuri Zhdanov.) Was he just lying? In his personal anecdotes, he tended to exaggerate more than totally invent his stories, especially about such a well-known trip. When he lied outright, he did not tell the lie himself, simply inserting it into the information of his propagandists. Thus he probably used that route at least once. Shotman says he arranged the first trip; the other sources are mixed up about the two trips. So this author believes that the meetings with Shotman concerned the first trip for which there was plenty of time to plan. For the second trip, for which there was no such time, Stalin and Valentina probably took the risk of crossing the border by a smugglers’ path.
135
Stalin told this story to Stanislaw Kot, the Polish Ambassador, at a Kremlin banquet in December 1941.