By February 1913, Malinovsky had betrayed the whole CC in Russia, except Stalin and the ineffectual Petrovsky. The Okhrana were determined to stop any SD reunion: Stalin the Conciliator was next.
On Saturday night, 23 February, Bolshevik sympathizers held a fund-raising concert and masquerade ball at the Kalashnikov Exchange, hardly Stalin’s usual scene. But the Alliluyev girls were excited about it. Stalin and their maths tutor, Kavtaradze, talked about going.
That afternoon, Stalin visited Malinovsky. The double-agent demanded he come to the ball. Stalin—as he later told Tatiana Slavatinskaya—refused, saying, “He wasn’t in the mood and didn’t have the right clothes. But Malinovsky kept insisting,” even reassuring him about security. The dapper traitor opened his dandyish wardrobe to Stalin, producing a stiff collar, dress shirt and silk cravat which he tied around Stalin’s neck.
Malinovsky had come almost directly from a meeting with his Okhrana controller, Imperial Police director Beletsky, probably promising to deliver Stalin.
“Vasily [Stalin] and I went to the party,” wrote his mistress, Tatiana Slavatinskaya, “and the party was nice.” Stalin, in his fancy cravat, sat at a table with the Bolshevik Duma deputies. “I was really surprised to see… our dear Georgian boy… at such a crowded party,” Demian Bedny, a proletarian bard, who in the 1920s became one of Stalin’s closest courtiers, informed Lenin afterwards. “It was really impudent to go there—was it the devil’s work or some fool who invited him? I told him, ‘You won’t escape.’” Bedny hinted that there was a traitor in their midst.
At about midnight, plainclothed Okhrana officers, backed by Gendarmes, took up positions at the back of the concert hall where the guests sat at tables. “Stalin was actually chatting to Malinovsky himself,” noticed Tatiana, when “he spotted that he was being followed.”
The detectives approached Stalin’s table and asked his name. He denied he was Djugashvili. Comrades stood up around him and tried to smuggle him to safety behind the stage. “He went into the artists’ dressing-room,” says Slavatinskaya, “and asked them to get me.” Once again, Stalin resorted to dressing up in drag, but he managed to tell Tatiana that he had “visited Malinovsky before the party and been followed from there.” Stalin was made up and decked out in a long dress. As he was being led out through the dressing room, a secret policeman spotted his big shoes (and surely his moustache). The policeman “seized him with a yell.”
“Djugashvili, we’ve finally got you!”
“I’m not Djugashvili. My name is Ivanov,” replied Stalin.
“Tell those stories to y’grandmother!”
It was over.
“Two plain-clothed agents asked him to go with them. All was done quietly. The ball went on.” Malinovsky hurried “after Comrade Stalin ‘protesting’ his arrest and promising to take measures to free him…”
Lenin innocently wrote to the traitor to “discuss how to forestall more arrests.” Lenin and Krupskaya fretted that “Vasily” (Stalin) must be “well protected.” It was too late: “Why is there no news of Vasily? What has happened to him? We’re worried.”
Stalin’s arrest was regarded as enough of a success for Police Director Beletsky to inform Interior Minister Maklakov himself, who on 7 June 1913 confirmed the Special Committee’s recommendation: J. V. Djugashvili was condemned to four years in Turukhansk, an obscure Siberian realm of frozen twilights, forgotten by civilization.{215}
PART FOUR
33. “Darling, I’m in Desperate Straits”
The steamer that slowly conveyed Stalin up the Yenisei River from Krasnoyarsk in mid-June 1913 revealed a Siberia of inconceivable remoteness and wild vastness. His destination, Turukhansk, was larger than Britain, France and Germany combined, yet contained just 12,000 people.
The Yenisei flowed through narrow valleys with high terraces until it widened so far that he could peer across its glistening flatness and see no land at all. The Siberian taiga was hilly and forested with dense larch climbing to ridges of flat alpine tundra. It was green and lush in summer, but severe and icily white in a winter that lasted nine months a year, sinking to temperatures as low as—60°. Between villages of peasants and convicts, the colossal spaces were only rarely dotted with the tents and reindeer of the shamanistic Tungus and Ostyak nomads.
The game of escape, capture and escape again was over. This was, as Robert Service puts it, “a landbound Devil’s Island.” This time, though Stalin did not yet realize it, the Autocracy meant business. From Petersburg it took just over a week to reach the regional capital, Krasnoyarsk, whence he was despatched northwards into Turukhansk. It was Stalin’s home for four years but would enter his heart and never leave it.
After travelling for twenty-six days, he disembarked on 10 August at the village of Monastyrskoe,[142] the “capital” of Turukhansk Province. “As you see I’m in Turukhansk,” he wrote to Zinoviev (and Lenin) in Cracow. “Did you get my letter sent on the way? I’ve fallen ill. I need to recover. Send me some money.” He was already planning his escape: “If you need my help, let me know and I’ll come immediately.”
Lenin did need his help. On 27 July, he had held a CC meeting at which he had ordered that Stalin and Sverdlov be sprung from exile. Each was sent sixty roubles, but once again Malinovsky betrayed the plan to the Okhrana, which telegraphed Turukhansk police chief Ivan Kibirov, warning that Stalin was an escape-artist. The officers in such places were themselves effectively exiled: Kibirov, an Ossetian, had been removed from the Baku police and posted to Turukhansk for misdemeanours unknown. Possibly because of their shared Ossetian origins, he favoured Stalin.
Soso was assigned to stay in Miroedikha, a hamlet to the south where he soon made himself felt. An exile named Innokenti Dubrovinsky had drowned in the river that summer, leaving an impressive library. Exile etiquette decreed the sharing of the libraries of the dead, but typically Stalin “expropriated” the books, refused to share them and started to read them ravenously. The life of the exiles rotated around just this sort of petty quarrel which Stalin was so expert at provoking. The other exiles were outraged—they complained, and blackballed him. Philip Zakharov, a Bolshevik, confronted the book-thief, but Stalin treated his impertinent visitor “like a Tsarist General would receive a private soldier who had the insolence to appear before him with a request.” Stalin behaved like the Khoziain, the Master, long before he was dictator of Russia—indeed he had done so since childhood.
142
This trading centre boasted a large missionary monastery, which had baptized the local tribesmen and which was led by a Mikhail Suslov, the great-grandfather and namesake of the Soviet grandee who was favoured by Stalin after the Second World War and who became the éminence grise of the Brezhnev era.