Stalin was being moved to the very edge of the Arctic Circle.{217}[143]
34. 1914: Arctic Sex Comedy
If Stalin called Kostino “an ill-fated place,” Kureika was a freezing hellhole, the sort of place where a man could believe himself utterly forgotten and even lose his sanity: its desolate solitude and obligatory self-containment were to remain with Stalin throughout his life. In March 1914, he and Sverdlov were transported northwards on a horse-drawn cart by their armed personal Gendarmes, Laletin and Popov.
They arrived to find that Kureika barely merited the name of hamlet, and it seemed that virtually all its inhabitants were related. Sixty-seven villagers, thirty-eight men and twenty-nine women, were packed into just eight ramshackle izbas, wooden peasant bungalows, more like huts than houses. Most of the citizens of this interbred settlement belonged to three families; these were the Taraseevs, the Saltykovs and the seven Pereprygin orphans.{218}
“One Monday, I was just boiling water for the washing,” said Anfisa Taraseeva,[144] “when I saw a man—with thick dark beard and hair—come in with a small case and some knotted bedding. ‘Hello, khoziaika [housewife], I’m staying with you,’ he said. He put down his suitcase as if he’d always lived with us. He played with the children and… when the men came back, he said, ‘I’m from Petersburg. My name is Josef Djugashvili.’”
Stalin and Sverdlov moved into the izba of Alexei and Anfisa Taraseev. At first all went well. The exiles got on easily with Taraseev, who agreed to receive their money orders. It was still cold there, but the ice was thawing. Life in Kureika was governed by the weather: when the Yenisei River froze, locals travelled on the icy river in sleighs, pulled by teams of reindeer and dogs. Then there was the “bad roads season” when the roads were so muddy that they were impassable. In May, the steamships started to ply the Yenisei for a few months; then the locals would boat downriver, tugged from the banks by dog-teams—until the freeze came.
Only the reindeer, snow-foxes and Tungus indigenous tribesmen could really function in deep midwinter. Everyone had to wear reindeer fur. The thirteen-year-old Lidia Pereprygina, one of the family of orphans, noticed that Stalin was underdressed with only a light coat. Soon he sported a full outfit—from boots to hat—of reindeer fur.
“In the new place, it’s much harder to settle,” Sverdlov wrote on 22 March. “It was bad enough I didn’t have a room to myself.” The two Bolshevik roommates were friendly enough at first: “We’re two of us sharing. My old friend, the Georgian, Djugashvili, is here with me: we met before in earlier exiles. He’s a good fellow but”—even after barely ten days together, there was a big “but”—“he is too much of an individualist[145] in everyday life.”
Worse, the Taraseevs had a noisy brood of children. “Our room adjoins the hosts,” complained Sverdlov in a letter, “we’ve no separate entrance. The children hang around the whole day, disturbing us.” But Sverdlov was also infuriated by the silent Tungus tribesmen, who visited the exiles. Dressed from head to food in reindeer furs, the Tunguses would become part of Stalin’s life. They were tough, nomadic fishermen and herdsmen with Oriental features who lived in harmony with their reindeer, believing in a mixture of primitive Orthodoxy and ancient spiritualism, interpreted by shamans—indeed “shaman” is a Tungus word.
The Tunguses “sat down, and kept silent for half an hour before standing up and saying, ‘Goodbye, we’ve got to go.’ They come in the evening, the best time for studying,” sighed Sverdlov. But Stalin befriended these men, as laconic as himself.
The tension was not just about children and housework. The touchy, vindictive Stalin brooded about the money sent to Sverdlov, and not to himself, as an escape fund. Days after his arrival, he had received neither the hundred roubles promised by Malinovsky nor the fees and the books from Zinoviev. Was Zinoviev disrespecting him? Was Sverdlov double-crossing him?
The Georgian and the Jew, the lost fulcrum of the Bolshevik Party in the Russian Empire, captive in their eight-shack village many time-zones from Europe, soon started to aggravate each other. On one side of their tiny dark room, Sverdlov scribbled about his roommate’s egotism, while on the other Stalin, at his nitpicking, seething worst, wrote to Malinovsky demanding that he sort out what had happened to the hundred roubles:
Five months ago, I received an invitation from a comrade in Petersburg to go there and to find the money for the trip. I answered four months ago but got no answer. Can you explain this misunderstanding to me? Then three months ago, I got a postcard from Kostya [Malinovsky himself offering to “sell the horse… for 100 roubles”]. I didn’t understand it and haven’t received the 100 roubles. Well, then Comrade Andrei [Sverdlov’s alias] got this sum… but I suppose it’s only for him. I’ve got no letters from Kostya ever since. I’ve received nothing from my sister Nadya [Krupskaya] for four months.
Stalin concluded that they had “chosen another man” to spring—Sverdlov. “Am I right, brother? I ask, dear friend, for a direct precise answer because I like clarity just as I hope you like clarity.”{219}
No two men liked clarity less than Stalin and Malinovsky, expert conspirators and dissimulators. But while the former stewed in distant frustration, the latter’s entire world was falling apart. There was a good reason Malinovsky had neither sold the “horse” nor answered Stalin’s letters. Stalin’s “dear friend Roman” was now an “hysterical” alcoholic doubleagent swigging vodka out of a teapot—and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Finally, a new Interior Minister and police director sacked Malinovsky, who resigned from the Duma on 8 May 1914. The Malinovsky case exploded very publicly in the faces of the government and police.
Malinovsky’s strongest defenders in the Party had been Lenin—and Stalin. “Lenin must have known,” Malinovsky said later, but he was wrong. Lenin would not believe the truth. But he weighed up the kudos won by Malinovsky in the Duma and his help in defeating (or removing, by arrest) the Conciliators (including Stalin) to conclude that “if he is a provocateur, the secret police gained less from it than our Party did.”[146]
Stalin, paranoia personified, did not suspect the greatest traitor of his political career. The Malinovsky case played its role in making him—and his comrades—obsessively paranoid. Malinovsky entered the Bolshevik consciousness. Like Banquo’s ghost, he haunted Soviet history. Henceforth, in the Bolshevik world of konspiratsia, nothing was too outlandish. If Malinovsky could be a traitor, why not the Soviet marshals, why not the entire General Staff, why not Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and most of the Central Committee, all shot as spies during the 1930s on Stalin’s orders?{220}
On the Arctic Circle, Stalin tormented himself and his roommate about the missing hundred roubles. “There’s a comrade [in Kureika],” reflected Sverdlov. “We know each other very well, but the saddest thing is that in exile a person appears bare, revealed in all his little idiosyncracies. The worst thing is that these ‘little things’ dominate a relationship. There’s little chance to show one’s better side.”
As the winter thawed, the Okhrana again warned on 27 April 1914 that the Bolsheviks were going “to organize the escapes of well-known Party men, Sverdlov and Djugashvili.” Stalin and Sverdlov frequently borrowed Fyodor Taraseev’s boat, but now the Gendarmes banned river expeditions. In May, when the steamboats again plied the Yenisei, Kureika’s tedium changed from an agony of cold to a plague of mosquitoes.
143
Sverdlov was wrong: there were two Kureikas. But their destination was just south of the Arctic Circle.
144
In 1942, the First Secretary of Krasnoyarsk, Constantin Chernenko, who had risen in the Terror by denunciation and even participation in executions, commissioned the well-known historian M. A. Moskalev to interview Stalin’s Turukhansk acquaintances for a sycophantic book,
145
“Individualist” was a Marxist insult because Bolsheviks were meant to submit the individual to the collective.
146
Like the Azef case, the revelations about Malinovsky, aired in the Duma, shook the political establishment and helped to undermine the credibility and competence not just of the Okhrana but also of the Duma, the Emperor and the state itself. One of Malinovsky’s first accusers was Elena (Rozmirovich) Troyanovskaya, Stalin’s hostess in Vienna, who had become Secretary to the Bolshevik Duma deputies. Yet the traitor dismissed this as the sour grapes of his ex-mistress. When Malinovsky was captured by the Germans during the war, Lenin sent him clothes, but after the Revolution, faced with the evidence, he changed his view: “What a swine: shooting’s too good for him.” Malinovsky was tried in November 1918, prosecuted, ironically, by Elena Rozmirovich’s husband, Nikolai Krylenko, at a tribunal chaired by Elena herself. Malinovsky was shot.