Soon Stalin “stopped talking to me,” wrote Sverdlov, “and let me know that I had to leave him alone and live separately.” Both moved out, Stalin temporarily finding refuge in Philip Saltykov’s izba. Moving out did not end Stalin’s Arctic sulk. “You know what nasty conditions I have in Kureika,” Sverdlovtold his wife, Klavidia, who was in exile nearby. “The companion… appears to have such a sense of his own personality that we don’t talk and meet one another.” Sverdlov’s letters capture the stress, depression (and bland menu) of this aimless existence.
I eat fish. My landlady makes me pies. I have sturgeon, white salmon with battered potatoes and caviar, salted sturgeon, sometimes I eat them raw. I feel too energyless even to add vinegar. I’ve ended all regular life. I eat irregularly. I study nothing. I go to sleep at odd times. Sometimes I walk for the whole night, sometimes I sleep at 10 a.m.
Stalin must have lived the same way: he never lost the nocturnal hours of Siberia.
In this eight-hut universe, the entire population must have been aware of this schism. “We just couldn’t harmonize our characters,” regretted Sverdlov. But there was probably another big but unspeakable reason for their fallout: a girl.{221}
No sooner had Stalin and Sverdlov settled with the Taraseevs than the Georgian must have noticed the youngest girl among the Pereprygin orphans. There were five brothers and two sisters, Natalia and Lidia. We know no details of how this developed. But some time in early 1914 Stalin, now thirty-four, embarked on an affair with Lidia, aged thirteen.
We catch a glimpse of Stalin and Lidia together staggering from drinking-bout to drinking-bout because we have her memoirs of their boozy carousals: “In his spare time, Stalin liked to go to evening dances—he could be very jolly too. He loved to sing and dance. He especially liked the song ‘I’m guarding the gold, the gold… I’m burying the gold, burying the gold, Guess where, pure damsel with your golden hair’… He often joined birthday dinners.” The memoirs of Stalin’s thirteen-year-old mistress were recorded twenty years later at the height of his dictatorship while she remained a Siberian housewife. The official who recorded her reminiscences would not have dared record the seduction, but the memoirs are still tactless. “He often liked to drop in on some people,” says Lidia, meaning herself. “And he also drank.” Was this how he seduced her—or she him? Girls in places like Kureika matured early—and Lidia does not sound like a shrinking violet.
Sverdlov may have disapproved of Stalin’s seduction of the thirteen-year-old, the latest in a line of adolescent girls romanced by the thirty-something Georgian. And Stalin may well have thrown him out in order to enjoy more privacy with his little mistress. But this was far from the end of the scandal.
The two Bolsheviks, now ignoring each other, were carefully watched by their own Gendarme inspectors, Laletin and Popov, whose sole job was to ensure that they did not escape. In cases of such close proximity, the policemen either became the companions, if not personal servants, of the exiles—or their mortal foes. The red-bearded, red-tempered Ivan Laletin soon became Stalin’s enemy.
Once Stalin was going out hunting with his rifle when he was challenged by the Gendarme. He was allowed to handle hunting-rifles with permission, but he refused to surrender his gun to the policeman. In the ensuing fracas, “Gendarme Laletin swooped on Josef Vissarionovich and tried to disarm him.” A fight started. The Gendarme “drew his sabre and managed to cut Stalin on the hand.” Stalin reported Laletin to Captain Kibirov.
By early summer, no matter how furtive the creeping around the eight huts, almost everyone must have known about Stalin’s little mistress. The sabrerattling Gendarme surely saw his chance to nail the insolent Georgian.
“One day,” recalls Fyodor Taraseev, the only villager who dared record the story, “Stalin was staying at home, working, and not leaving the house. The Gendarme found this suspicious and decided to check up on him. Without knocking on the door, he burst into the room.”
Taraseev prudently claims that Stalin was just “working,” yet the inspector found this oddly “suspicious.” And Stalin was furious at being interrupted. The memoirs unanimously emphasize his calmness during searches: so was there something unusual about this one? After all, the policeman deliberately surprised him “without knocking.” It sounds very much as if the policeman caught Stalin and Lidia in flagrante delicto.
Stalin attacked him. The policeman again drew his sabre. In the ensuing fight, Stalin was wounded in the neck by the sabre, which so inflamed his anger that “he kicked out the rogue!”
“We witnessed this scene,” says Taraseev. “The Gendarme was running away towards the Yenisei river, cravenly waving his sabre in front of him while Comrade Stalin was pursuing him in a state of high excitement and fury, with his fists clenched.”
If it was a secret, it was out. Even though local lore discouraged affairs with exiles, the local girls were bound to be attracted to these worldly, educated revolutionaries in their midst. This statutory rape was not rape by force but an old-fashioned seduction because, according to the later investigation by KGB Chairman Ivan Serov, “J. V. Stalin started living together with her.” Presumably she was sharing his room, which is how the policeman had caught them together. In his report to Nikita Khrushchev and the Politburo in 1956, which remained secret until the twenty-first century, General Serov implied that the living together was almost as shocking as the seduction.[147]
Stalin moved into the Pereprygin izba. There were two rooms and a shed for cattle in winter. The seven siblings were crammed into one fuggy, cow-dungy room; Stalin rented the filthy second chamber that could only be reached through the cowshed and family room. It contained just a “table covered in newspapers, wooden trestle bed, and tangle of fishing and hunting nets, tackle and hooks, all made by Stalin himself.” Everything was covered in soot from the black tin chimney in the middle of the room.
The glass in the windows was broken, so Stalin sealed the cracks with old newspapers or boarded them up. The only light in this Arctic twilight, where night often lasted throughout the day, was a lamp, but he often lacked kerosene. The lavatory was an outhouse. The Pereprygins were dirt poor, “one day eating shchi [cabbage broth], the next day the holy spirit [nothing], but they owned one cow.”
At night, Lidia would creep into his room, recounts Stalin’s first biographer, Essad Bey, who must have talked to fellow exiles. Certainly she was not shy about recalling what underwear he favoured—“He wore white underwear and a sailor-striped vest,” she confided to her interviewer in 1952 when Stalin was almost worshipped as a demi-god.
The brothers were not happy about the seduction. There are hints of their disapprovaclass="underline" Stalin got his food and bread from his old landlady, not from the Pereprygins, though Lidia claimed that “this was because the girls were too young to cook.” Yet as orphans the girls had cooked for their brothers from an early age. More likely, Soso and his moll were banned from family meals.
The affair might have remained tolerable, but there was worse to come: Lidia fell pregnant with Stalin’s child. The Pereprygin brothers were angry, even though the exact law of consent was hardly enforced in distant communities in the Arctic Circle, where girls married and had children in their early teens. According to General Serov, Gendarme Laletin, despite having fled from the irate Stalin, threatened “to instigate criminal proceedings for living together with an underage girl. J. V. Stalin promised the Gendarme to marry Pereprygina when she came of age.” So, once again, Stalin became engaged—and the family, whether gratefully or begrudgingly, accepted the relationship.[148] In return, Stalin “shared his fish with them” as one of the family. Indeed he treated Lidia almost as his young wife. When his friend the elderly Elizaveta Taraseeva visited, Stalin commanded: “Lidia, Lidia, babushka’s come to tea! Feed her well.”
147
For decades there were rumours of Stalin’s rape or seduction of a girl in Turukhansk and his fathering a child. This first appeared in Essad Bey’s biography of 1931. Svetlana Alliluyeva says her aunts told her Stalin had a son in exile. The stories were repeated in biographies and sensational newspaper articles but seemed outlandish, presumably just anti-Stalin myths. But it is confirmed by the KGB in General Serov’s 18 July 1956 memorandum to First Secretary Khrushchev and the Politburo. Serov, a brutal Stalinist secret policeman, had the sense to separate himself from Beria and attach himself to Khrushchev. After Stalin’s death, he assisted Khrushchev in the arrest and execution of Beria, becoming the first Chairman of the KGB, the new version of the secret police. His memo was read in secrecy at a Politburo meeting and signed by all Stalin’s old henchmen before being consigned to the top secret “Special File.”
148
Fourteen was technically the age of consent in the Russian and European regions of the Tsarist Empire, but this was Siberia. Besides, there was no precise legal concept of statutory rape in Tsarist law: for the police, it was as much a crime “against female honour” as a violation of her father’s chattels. The seducer’s agreement to marry and then the exchange of marriage vows were seen as rectifying an untoward situation.