The policeman’s interference was the final straw. Stalin complained to Captain Kibirov, who favoured his fellow Caucasian. Stalin had a village of witnesses to the hapless Gendarme drawing his sword on an exile and the ignominious chase along the riverbank. Yet it took considerable chutzpah for Stalin to complain about the policeman when he had impregnated an underaged girl. As so often with Stalin’s self-righteous indignation, it worked.
That summer of 1914, around June, Kibirov agreed to replace Laletin, telling his deputy, “All right, let’s send Merzliakov to Kureika. Since Djugashvili is so keen to replace his inspector, let’s get him out of harm’s way.” In a reversal of roles, Gendarme Laletin was afraid of his prisoner—and with good reason. His replacement, Mikhail Merzliakov, now arrived. Stalin immediately assumed the role of quasi-aristocratic master, while the Gendarme became a cross between valet, batman and bodyguard for the rest of his sentence.
Stalin kept studying the nationalities issue, and English and German. “Dear friend,” a rather more cheerful Stalin wrote to Zinoviev on 20 May, “my warmest greetings to you… I’m waiting for the books… I also ask you to send me some English journals (an old or new issue doesn’t matter—it’s for reading since there’s nothing in English here and I’m afraid I’m losing all my acquired English skills without any practice…”
Soso’s engagement to Lidia, indeed the relationship itself, was a transitory amusement to be abandoned by the wayside of his revolutionary mission. The pregnancy was presumably an irritant. Yet the locals claim that Lidia was in love with Stalin. It was not her last pregnancy by him.{222}
In late summer, Sverdlov left Kureika and moved to Selivanikha, while Suren Spandarian, Stalin’s best friend, arrived in nearby Monastyrskoe.
In late August 1914, Stalin took the boat downriver for a reunion with Spandarian—just as the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo, a shot that sent Russia and the Great Powers lurching into the Great War. “The bourgeois vampires of the belligerent countries plunged the world into a bloody shambles,” wrote Stalin. “Wholesale slaughter, ruin, starvation and… savagery—so that a handful of crowned and uncrowned robbers may pillage foreign lands and rake in untold millions.”
As the lights went out all over Europe, Stalin found himself irrelevant, forgotten, frustrated and engaged against his will to a pregnant adolescent peasant-girl, at the centre of nothing—except an Arctic sex scandal. Nineteen-fourteen was not his finest hour. As the Great Powers fought, the snows obscured the sun and the news from the outside world. Stalin disappeared into the Siberian winter.{223}
35. The Hunter
Now the only exile in ice-bound, twilighted Kureika, Stalin started to live closely with aboriginal Tunguses and Ostyaks. There was little to do, but survival was a struggle: tundra wolves howled at the edge of the village. When Stalin visited the outhouse lavatory, he fired a rifle to keep the wolves at bay. When he travelled, the sleigh “dashed along under the interminable howls of wolves.” The wolf-packs of Kureika entered Stalin’s consciousness, the enemies always circling his Siberian hut. He sketched them on documents during meetings, especially towards the end of his life as he orchestrated a last Terror campaign, the Doctors’ Plot. In his last exile, he told visitors, “The peasants used to shoot mad wolves.”
Yet somehow it suited Stalin: he began to enjoy Kureika. Strangely, it became one of the happiest times in his morose life. His favourite companions were a little dog called Stepan Timofeevich, or Tishka for short, which the locals gave him as a present, a Tungus fisherman named Martin Peterin, and his police inspector, Merzliakov. Lidia’s pregnancy was increasingly visible. Siberia became more bearable because Stalin now began to receive regular money orders: during 1915–16, he received ten, worth more than one hundred roubles in all, so he could buy food and clothes and pay bribes where necessary.[149]
He became the solitary hunter, a role that suited his self-image as a man on a sacred mission, riding out into the snows with a rifle for company, but no attachments except his faith, lacking all bourgeois sentimentality but always displaying Arctic stoicism even when beset by tragedy. For the rest of his life, he regaled Alliluyevs or Politburo grandees with tales of his Siberian adventures. Even when he ruled Russia he was still that solitary hunter.
“Osip” or “Pockmarked Oska,” as they called him, venturing out alone in a head-to-foot reindeer-fur outfit, became a skilled hunter and close companion of the tribesmen. Laletin did not permit him to own a rifle, so, one local remembers, “We took the rifle to the woods and left it on a pre-agreed tree so he’d find it.” He shot Arctic foxes, partridges and ducks on long expeditions.
The villagers began to respect Pockmarked Oska, with his pipe and books. “The locals liked him,” says Merzliakov. “They visited him and sat all night with him. He visited them too and attended their merry parties.” They brought him fish and venison, which he purchased. He appreciated their laconic tranquillity and was amused by their respect for shamans and by their persistent belief, despite nominal Orthodoxy, in the masters and spirits who inhabited the spaces of Siberia. Above all, he studied and copied their fishing and hunting techniques.
Fish and reindeer were their staples. The reindeer, who are able to live on blankets of lichen, were treated with sacred respect by the tribesmen, providing transport (pulling sleighs), clothing (furs), investment (the wealthiest chiefs owned herds of 10,000) and food (boiled reindeer meat), all in one. Peterin, probably an Ostyak creole, taught his friend the art of Yenisei fishing. Stalin made his own fishing-line and dug his own personal ice-hole, remembers Merzliakov, whose memoir, recorded in 1936, is the best account of his life in Kureika. According to Stalin’s own somewhat Gothic account, he learned to fish with such dexterity at his ice-hole that the Ostyak whispered awestruck: “Thou ist possessed by the Word.” Stalin enjoyed the fish diet: “There were lots of fish, but salt was as precious as gold, so they just threw the fish into their outhouse where in the—20° freeze they piled up like frozen pieces of wood. Then we’d break flakes off and let them melt in our mouths.” He started to catch huge sturgeons.
“Once,” he recounted, “a tempest caught me on the river. It seemed I was done for, but I made it to the bank.” Another time, he was coming home with Ostyak friends with a good catch of sturgeon and sea-salmon when he got separated from the others. A purga, the blinding blizzard of the tundra, blew up suddenly. Kureika was far away, but he could not abandon his fish, sustenance for weeks, so he trudged on until he saw figures ahead. He called after them, but they disappeared: they were his companions but, seeing him embroidered from beard to feet in white ice, they believed him a demon spirit and fled. When he finally reached a hut and burst in, the Ostyaks cried out: “Is that you, Osip?”
149
The payments have attracted suspicion, but they are much too meagre for the wages of an Okhrana agent. They included some of his CC salary; and, as we have seen, Sverdlov received far more. Yet during the Great Terror in 1938 Stalin’s secret police chief, “poison dwarf” Nikolai Yezhov, who had become his closest henchman and was presiding over the slaughter of over a million innocent people, began to realize that he was dispensable. Yezhov, sinking into alcoholism and sexual debauchery under the terrible strain of killing and torturing, gathered materials to use as security or blackmail against his master and the rival magnates Beria, Georgi Malenkov and Khrushchev. He procured Stalin’s ten money orders and kept them in his personal safe, but there is no smoking gun here. Three of them were money from Gori, probably from his mother or Egnatashvili. The other seven, from Moscow and Petersburg, adding up to 100 roubles, delivered 10 roubles here, 10 roubles there, though two were a more considerable 25 roubles each. They did not save Yezhov, who was dismissed in late 1938 and shot in 1940. Interestingly Stalin did not deign to destroy the money orders, just filing them in Yezhov’s papers where they were found by Professor Arch Getty, who has generously shared them with me. For the full story of the rise and fall of Yezhov, see