“Illich was very nervous about Pravda,” recalls Krupskaya. Lenin was actually exasperated with Stalin’s conciliatory editorials. “Stalin was also nervous. They were planning how to adjust matters.” Lenin mulled over his dual problems of asserting control over Pravda, creating a nationalities policy and promoting his valued henchman. He needed a Bolshevik expert on nationalities who was not Russian—and certainly not Jewish. Three years earlier, he had hailed Stalin as more of an expert on nationality than Jordania. Here was a solution that would kill two birds with one stone.
Lenin proposed that, instead of returning to Petersburg, Stalin stay on to write an essay laying out their new Bolshevik nationalities policy. Stalin accepted.
Around 28 December 1912, Lenin, Stalin and Zinoviev were joined by Malinovsky and two other Duma deputies, Stalin’s friend Valentina Lobova and a wealthy Bolshevik couple who lived in Vienna, Alexander and Elena Troyanovsky, along with their child’s Latvian nanny. “Koba didn’t speak very loudly” but “in a deliberate measured manner… with indisputable logic,” recalls the nineteen-year-old nanny, Olga Veiland. “Sometimes he went through to the other room so he could pace up and down listening to the speeches.”
Stalin still resisted Lenin, who was now vociferously backed by Malinovsky—for the most dubious reasons. Lenin and the Okhrana shared their opposition to any SD reunification. Thus the secret police ordered Malinovsky to push this hard line, while Stalin still argued he could convert a few Mensheviks. He hoped Lenin would see that “it was better to co-operate and postpone hardline politics for a while.” Besides, the Duma Six needed a real leader: himself, no doubt.
“There’s an insufferable atmosphere here,” Stalin grumbled in a letter to Petersburg. “Everyone’s impossibly busy, goddamned busy, [but] my situation isn’t actually too bad.” He then wrote an almost loving letter to his old friend Kamenev: “I give you an Eskimo kiss on the nose. The Devil take me! I miss you—I swear it like a dog! There’s no one, absolutely no one to have a heart-to-heart conversation with, damn you. Can’t you somehow make it over here to Cracow?”
Yet Stalin did make a new friend in Cracow: Malinovsky. The convicted rapist and Okhrana traitor, two years older than Stalin, was now enjoying a lavish Okhrana salary of 8,000 roubles per annum—more than the director of Imperial Police, who got only 7,000.
“He was lively, resourceful, handsome,” remembered Molotov, “and he looked a bit like Tito.” Henceforth Stalin wrote to him warmly, sending love to “Stefania and the kids.” Malinovsky slyly denounced other Bolsheviks as traitors to distract attention from himself, but the pressure of a double life was beginning to drive him to breakdown.
At the last meeting on New Year’s Eve 1912, Stalin caved in to Lenin. “All decisions are being accepted unanimously,” enthused Lenin to Kamenev. “A huge success.” But Stalin’s retreat was far from bitter. The meeting, as Malinovsky reported to his Okhrana paymasters, reestablished the Bolshevik machine: a Foreign Bureau (Lenin and Zinoviev with Krupskaya as Secretary) alongside a Russian Bureau, dominated by Stalin and Sverdlov, now Pravda’s chief editor, with Valentina Lobova as secretary.[136] Stalin was moved from Pravda yet emerged as the senior Bolshevik in Russia (salary: sixty roubles a month), on a prestigious mission to play the theoretician. Stalin was writing hard on the nationalities question, Lenin making suggestions. Stalin sent off his first draft to Petersburg.
Afterwards, Lenin and the Bolsheviks went out to the theatre to celebrate the New Year, “but the play was very bad,” recalls Olga Veiland. “Vladimir Illich walked out with his wife.” Lenin, Stalin and the others saw in the New Year 1913 in a private room at a restaurant. When she was an old lady, Veiland confided that Stalin had started to become flirtatious. “Lenin seemed very cheerful, joking and laughing. He started singing and even joined in the games we were playing.”{212}
Soon afterwards, Stalin arrived at the apartment of the Troyanovskys in a frozen Vienna, shrouded in snow. Lenin called them “good people… They have money!” Alexander Troyanovsky was a handsome young nobleman and army officer: his service in the Russo-Japanese War had converted him to Marxism and now he edited and funded Prosveshchenie (Enlightenment)—which was to publish Soso’s essay. Fluent in German and English, he lived with his beautiful noble-born wife, Elena Rozmirovich, in a large, comfortable apartment at 30 Schönbrunnerschloss Strasse,[137] the boulevard along which the old Emperor Franz-Josef travelled back and forth every day from his residence at the Schönbrunn Palace to his office at the Hofburg.
The antique, bewhiskered Habsburg Kaiser, who had reigned since 1848, travelled in a gilded carriage drawn by eight white horses, manned by postilions decked out in black-and-white-trimmed uniforms and white perukes, escorted by Hungarian horsemen with yellow-and-black panther furs over their shoulders. Stalin would not have been able to miss this vision of obsolescent magnificence—and he was not the only future dictator to see it: the cast of twentieth-century titans in Vienna that January 1913 belongs in a Tom Stoppard play.[138] In a men’s dosshouse on Meldemannstrasse, in Brigettenau, another world from Stalin’s somewhat grander address, lived a young Austrian who was a failed artist: Adolf Hitler, aged twenty-three.
Soso and Adolf shared one of the sights of Vienna: Hitler’s best friend Kubizek recalls, “We often saw the old Emperor when he rode in his carriage from Schönbrunn to the Hofburg.” But both future dictators were unmoved, even disdainfuclass="underline" Stalin never mentioned it and “Adolf did not make much ado of it for he wasn’t interested in the Emperor, just the state which he represented.”
In Vienna, both Hitler and Stalin were obsessed, in different ways, with race. In this city of antiquated courtiers, Jewish intellectuals and racist rabble-rousers, cafés, beer halls and palaces, only 8.6 percent were actually Jews but their cultural influence, personified by Freud, Mahler, Wittgenstein, Buber and Schnitzler, was much greater. Hitler was formulating the anti-Semitic völkische theories of racial supremacy that, as Führer, he would impose on his European empire; while Stalin, researching his nationalities article, was shaping a new idea for an internationalist empire with a central authority behind an autonomous façade, the prototype of the Soviet Union. Almost thirty years later, their ideological and state structures were to clash in the most savage conflict of human history.
The Jews did not fit into either of their visions. They repelled and titillated Hitler but irritated and confounded Stalin, who attacked their “mystical” nature. Too much of a race for Hitler, they were not enough of a nation for Stalin.
But the two nascent dictators shared a Viennese pastime: both liked to walk in the park around Franz-Josef’s Schönbrunn Palace, close to where Stalin stayed. Even when they became allies in the 1939 Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact, they never met. Those walks were probably the closest they ever came.
“Those few weeks that Comrade Stalin spent with us were devoted entirely to the national question,” says the Troyanovskys’ nanny, Olga Veiland. “He involved everyone around him. Some analysed Otto Bauer, others Karl Kautsky.” Despite intermittent study, Stalin could not read German, so the nanny helped—as did another young Bolshevik whom he met now for the first time: Nikolai Bukharin, an intellectual pixie with sparkling eyes and a goatee beard. “Bukharin came to our apartment every day,” says Olga Veiland, “as Stalin lived there too.” While Stalin flirted hopefully with the nanny, she preferred the witty, puckish Bukharin. Besides, it was her job to clean Stalin’s shirts and underwear, which, she complained after his death, was something of a challenge.
136
Stalin’s friend from Tiflis, Kalinin, was not promoted to the CC because he was temporarily suspected of being an Okhrana double-agent: the Bolsheviks, even while being betrayed by Malinovsky at the very heart of the Party, suspected an innocent comrade.
137
Now a boarding-house, the Pension Schönbrunn, which unusually still bears the blue plaque put up in 1949 that reads: J.V. STALIN RESIDED IN THIS HOUSE DURING JANUARY 1913. HE WROTE HIS IMPORTANT WORK “MARXISM AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION” HERE.