Stalin and Bukharin got on well. Stalin would write to him from exile, the start of an alliance that culminated in a political partnership in the late 1920s. But Soso came, suffocatingly, to adore and, fatally, to envy Bukharin. The friendship that began in Vienna ended in the 1930s with a bullet in Bukharin’s head.
“I was sitting at the table beside the samovar in the apartment of Skobelev… in the ancient capital of the Habsburgs,” reports Trotsky, also living in Vienna, “when suddenly the door opened with a knock and an unknown man entered. He was short… thin… his greyish-brown skin covered in pockmarks… I saw nothing in his eyes that resembled friendliness.” It was Stalin, who “stopped at the samovar and made himself a cup of tea. Then as silently as he had come, he left, leaving a very depressing but unusual impression on me. Or perhaps later events cast a shadow over our first meeting.”
Stalin already despised Trotsky, whom he had called a “noisy phoney champion with fake muscles.” He never changed his view. Trotsky, for his part, was chilled by Stalin’s yellow eyes: they “glinted with malice.”
Stalin’s stay with Troyanovsky was a revelation—it was his first and last experience ofcivilized European living, as he himself admitted. He lived in the room that overlooked the street and “worked there for entire days.” At dusk, he would stroll around Schönbrunn Park with the Troyanovskys. At dinner, he sometimes talked about his past, reminiscing about Lado Ketskhoveli and how he was shot in prison. He was characteristically morose. “Hello, my friend,” he wrote to Malinovsky, now back in Petersburg. “So far I’m living in Vienna and writing some rubbish. See you soon.” But he improved. “Shy and solitary at first,” says Olga Veiland, “he became more relaxed and fun.” He did not feel uneasy with Troyanovsky’s genteel style. On the contrary, he remained fond of him throughout his life.
Little Galina Troyanovskaya was a spirited child who got on well with Stalin. “She loved being in adult company,” and Stalin played with her, promising to bring her “mountains of green chocolate from the Caucasus.” He “used to laugh very loudly” when she did not believe him. But she often teased him back: “You’re always talking about the nations!” she groused. Stalin bought the child sweets in Schönbrunn Park. Once he made a bet with her mother that if they both called to Galina, she would go to Stalin for the sweets. They tested his theory: Galina ran to Soso, confirming his cynical view of human nature.[139]
Stalin now asked Malinovsky to return the first draft of his article so he could revise it, adding, “Tell me 1. How is Pravda? 2. How is your faction? 3. How is the group doing?… Yours Vasily.” He rewrote the article before he left Vienna forever.[140]
Lenin awaited him in Cracow; betrayal lurked in Petersburg.{213}
32. The Secret Policeman’s Balclass="underline" Betrayal in Drag
I returned to Cracow to show Lenin,” Stalin recounted. “Two days later, Lenin invited me over and I noticed the manuscript lying open on the desk. He asked me to sit next to him.”
Lenin was impressed. “Is it you who really wrote this?” he asked Stalin, a little patronizingly.
“Yes, Comrade Lenin, I wrote it. Did I get something wrong?” “No, on the contrary, it’s really splendid!”
Lenin was determined to publish the piece as policy. “The article is very good!” he told Kamenev. “It’s a fighting issue and we won’t surrender one iota of our principled opposition to the Bundist trash!” In a letter to Gorky, he acclaimed Stalin as his “wonderful Georgian.”
Soso published the article in March 1913 under his new byline “K. Stalin,” the second time he had used it. It had been evolving since 1910 when he started signing articles as “K.St.,” then “K. Safin” and “K. Solin.”
The conspiratorial life required a roster of aliases, often chosen at random. Ulyanov may have taken “Lenin” from the Siberian river Lena, but he used 160 aliases altogether. He kept “Lenin” because it happened to be his byline on the article, “What Is to Be Done?,” made his name. Similarly Soso used “Stalin” when he published the article on nationalities that made his reputation, which was one reason that it stuck. If he had not been such a self-obsessed melodramatist, he might have been known to history as “Vasiliev” or “Ivanovich.”
Its other attraction was the vague similarity to “Lenin” itself, but Stalin also fashioned aliases out of the names of his women: it is plausible that his girlfriend Ludmilla Stal helped inspire this one. He would never have admitted it. “My comrades gave me the name,” he smugly told an interviewer. “They thought it suited me.” Molotov knew this was not true, saying, “That’s what he called himself.” But this flint-hearted “industrial name,” meaning Man of Steel, did suit his character—and was a symbol of everthing a Bolshevik should be.[141]
The name was Russian, though he never ceased to be Caucasian, combining the Georgian “Koba” with the Slavic “Stalin” (though his friends still called him “Soso”). Henceforth he adopted what the historian Robert Service calls a “bi-national persona.” After 1917, he became quadri-nationaclass="underline" Georgian by nationality, Russian by loyalty, internationalist by ideology, Soviet by citizenship.
It started as a byline—and ended as an empire and a religion. When he was dictator, Stalin shouted at his feckless son Vasily for exploiting their surname: “You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin! Stalin is Soviet power!”
By mid-February 1913, the newly minted “Koba Stalin” was back in Petersburg, where the Bolsheviks, betrayed at every turn by Malinovsky, were on the run.{214}
“It’s a total Bacchanalia of arrests, searches and raids,” Stalin reported to the Troyanovskys in a letter opened by the Okhrana. He added that he had not forgotten his promise to six-year-old Galina: “I’ll send the chocolate to Galochka.”
Stalin, now empowered by Lenin, but beleaguered by vigorous Okhrana action, did not even try to hide. He stayed on Shpalernaya Street in the town centre at the apartment of Duma deputies Badaev and Samoilov, attending meetings at the home of their fellow deputy Petrovsky. Stalin sighs, in another letter, “There aren’t any competent people. I can hardly keep up with everything.”
His first challenge was to defend his parliamentary star, Malinovsky, from a shocking accusation. An article identified Malinovsky as an Okhrana spy. Since the article was signed “Ts,” the Bolsheviks believed that the libeller was a Menshevik, Martov (real name Tsederbaum), or his brother-in-law Fyodor Dan. “The Bolshevik Vasiliev [Stalin] came to my apartment (he was known as ‘Ioska Koriavyi’ [Joe Pox]) trying to stop the rumours about Malinovsky,” said Fyodor Dan. Joe Pox warned Dan’s wife, Lidia, that she would regret it if the Mensheviks tried to smear Malinovsky.
Yet, thanks to Malinovsky, Stalin’s every move was now monitored by the Imperial Police director himself. On 10 February, Sverdlov was arrested, betrayed by Malinovsky. Now Stalin decided to appoint his Baku comrade Shaumian as Pravda’s editor, but Malinovsky persuaded Lenin that the Armenian would be too conciliatory, like Stalin himself. Lenin backed Malinovsky’s candidate, Chernomazov, who, as Stalin had divined back in Baku, was another Okhrana double-agent.
139
In the incestuous world of Bolshevism, Elena later divorced Troyanovsky and then had an affair with Malinovsky the traitor (according to Malinovsky). She married the Bolshevik grandee Nikolai Krylenko, a member of Lenin’s first government, later Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army, then Procurator-General, finally a brutal People’s Commissar for Justice who was himself shot in the Great Terror. Fortunately Krylenko left Elena in the late 1920s, which probably saved her life, for she survived the Terror, working quietly in the archives, dying naturally in 1953. The Troyanovskys’ daughter Galina married another Bolshevik magnate, Valerian Kuibyshev, Stalinist Politburo member, womanizer and drinker who ill treated her. Stalin said he would have intervened if he had known of Kuibyshev’s drunken promiscuity. Kuibyshev’s suspicious death from alcoholism in 1935 suited Stalin. The nanny Olga Veiland became a Party and Comintern apparatchik, retiring young and surviving into old age. The destiny of Troyanovsky—even though he turned against the Bolsheviks—was very different: see the Epilogue.
140
141
“Solin” and “Safin,” the earlier versions of his new name, may have been typos because