Stalin and His Hangmen (9 page)

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Why did the Russian state treat with such leniency those it knew were trying to overthrow it by organizing assassinations, armed robberies, sabotage and strikes? In 1908 in France Koba and Kamo would have gone to the guillotine, in Britain to the gallows, in America to the electric chair. True, revolutionaries in Russia were often tried by military tribunals, convicted on flimsy evidence and hanged; but this happened mostly in the west of Russia, in Vilnius, Kiev or Odessa, where governors general ruled and where the revolutionaries were more often than not reviled Poles or Jews. Piotr Stolypin, the most effective prime minster that Tsarist Russia ever had, for all his pragmatic liberalism was so willing to hang those who threatened the state that the hangman’s rope became known as the Stolypin necktie.

Nevertheless, Stalin and his kind – Sverdlov, Kalinin, Kamenev – could get away with a few months in prison followed by an amnesty. In prison their secondary education entitled them to be treated as gentlemen – to receive visitors, good food, medical treatment and polite warders. When they were sent to Siberia, they were given a living allowance that provided ample heating, food, even a servant and a cow. They lived among a friendly population; even the gendarmes who guarded them usually looked kindly on them, and when they were bored with each other’s company or the long Siberian winter, they could easily escape. In Britain, Switzerland, France or America, they found a sympathetic reception. Nobody in western Europe believed that intellectual socialist revolutionary refugees from Russia posed a danger to anybody, and tolerating them provided some leverage on the Russian state, should it threaten the colonial empires of Britain or France in the Far East.

Tolerance apart, the Russian state had two fatal flaws in the second decade of the twentieth century. First, it spoke with a forked tongue. One fork was the Tsar: a constitutional, not an absolute monarch after 1905, he still had enormous power. Under the influence of his wife, a woman far more wilful than he and just as stupid, he would dismiss any minister who seemed to diminish his authority. The other fork was the new parliament, the Duma, which talked up radical reform. Each successive Duma had a more restricted electorate and thus became less radical, but despite the presence of a monarchist right wing, its liberals and socialists demanded human rights and economic reforms. Between
the Tsar and the Duma stood the ministers. The Russian state was sustained by a series of wise, energetic self-sacrificing ministers – Count Sergei Witte, who made the Russian rouble one of Europe’s strongest currencies, Piotr Stolypin, who for five brief years truly liberated the Russian peasant, Piotr Sviatopolk-Mirsky, who brought about the liberal spring of 1904. But the uncomprehending conservatism of the Tsar and the irresponsibility of the Duma nullified their efforts.

The economic boom that gathered strength in 1908 deceived most observers. They underestimated the weakness of Russia’s political structures and discounted the threat posed by the revolutionary left. Even the Ministry of the Interior and the gendarmerie had a liberal view of their educated opponents. Russian public opinion generally adopted a Christian attitude towards criminals, particularly politically motivated ones. When the anarchist Giashvili was sentenced to death for exploding a bomb that killed a senior government official, nobody in Tbilisi would act as his executioner. He was reprieved – laudable in a Christian or humanistic culture, but disastrous for a state whose weaknesses were being probed by embittered fanatics.

Because these fanatics were split into factions, the consensus was that they were too weak to cause serious damage. The Social Revolutionaries, whose incoherent mysticism made them spectacular assassins, aroused most alarm, while the Bolshevik Social Democrats, who used violence selectively and who seemed in thrall to obscure German political ideas, were belittled despite their nearly overturning the state with their workers’ and soldiers’ soviets in the 1905 uprising.

Corruption, endemic in the bureaucracy at all but the highest levels, undermined the Russian state. Bribery and infiltration crippled the Tsar’s gendarmerie – even if, by the standards of today’s Russian militia (which a cynic might call the uniformed branch of the mafia), the gendarmerie was an efficient and dedicated force.

In 1908 the prophets of doom – and their voice was loud among Russia’s newspaper tycoons, philosophers, theologians and poets – sensed that Russian’s Armageddon would come from a world war into which its alliance with Britain, France and Serbia, and the myopia of the Tsar’s family, would drag it. There was no good reason for Russia to be drawn into a quarrel with the Kaiser’s Germany or Habsburg Austria-Hungary; Russia had no seas whose waves they needed to rule, no colonies to
expand at the expense of other empires. The rush towards 1914 was that of Gadarene swine.

The Bolsheviks attacked the Russian state not because it was oppressive but because it was weak. The Russia of 1908 did nearly as much for its citizens as the states of western Europe did for theirs. Trial by jury, equality before the law, enlightened treatment of ethnic minorities, religious tolerance, cheap credits for farmers, an efficient postal and railway service, a free press, flourishing universities with leading scientists, doctors and scholars, universal (if impoverished) primary education and primary medical care, the most powerful outburst of creativity in all the arts that Europe had known since the Italian Renaissance – all this outweighed for many observers the endemic alcoholism and syphilis, the idleness and bribery, the foul roads, the idle bureaucrats, the general poverty. Russia’s ills seemed curable by economic progress.

Lenin’s followers had a clever motto: ‘The worse, the better.’ They actively encouraged (if only by not assassinating them) brutal governors general, stupid gendarmerie colonels, exploitative factory owners, because these men might create a resentful proletariat who would follow the social democrats.

When Stalin went to prison and into exile, he was not isolated or disadvantaged. He could educate himself further, meet other revolutionary socialists from all over the Russian empire and, when he left this incubation stage, emerge all the more effective and dangerous a pestilence.

Prison and Exile

… from the forest a rifle fired, it shot Diambeg dead… and
wounded next to him Giorgola, who heard a voice: ‘I am Koba!
I have avenged my friend Iago!’ Aleksandre Qazbegi,
The Parricide

Awaiting deportation in cell No. 3 of Baku’s Bailov prison, Koba was visited by his mother and a girl, a neighbour from Gori. He valued his fellow inmates more than visitors, forging bonds with two in particular: Sergo Orjonikidze, a Transcaucasian bandit and party organizer, and
Andrei Vyshinsky, a well-educated Menshevik lawyer from Kiev. Orjonikidze was emotional if brutal, and loyal. Vyshinsky was the most calculating and cynical of all Stalin’s associates; for twenty years he would provide the oratory and the legal framework to send hundreds of thousands to their death. Even in prison Vyshinsky found a comfortable niche: he was cell monitor and worked in the prison kitchens.

Koba made two escape attempts, but by early 1909, delayed en route by typhus, he was in exile in the north of Russia, at Solvychegodsk, fifteen miles over a frozen river from the railhead at Kotlas. Little detained Koba there; as exiles remarked, only those who couldn’t be bothered to escape stayed. Koba fled first to St Petersburg, where his future father-in-law Sergei Alliluev found him a safe house owned by a concierge. (Concierges in Russia as in France, trusted by the police, provided the safest refuge for criminals on the run.)

That summer Koba was hiding in Baku, printing news-sheets. He saw neither his mother nor his son. Another woman entered Koba’s life: Stefaniia Petrovskaia, who had left her Odessa home when her father remarried and entered into a common-law marriage with a political exile in Solvychegodsk, but fell in love with Koba and followed him to Baku.

In March 1910, Koba pronounced his first death sentence on a party member. When the typesetters refused to continue working at the Bolshevik underground printworks, Koba believed that the party had been infiltrated by half a dozen informers and demanded that one, Nikolai Leontiev, be summoned to a meeting and killed. Leontiev, however, fought back, demanded a ‘trial’, agreeing to die if found guilty. Support for a kangaroo court evaporated and Leontiev lived. Shortly afterwards, Koba was again arrested.

Under interrogation, Koba disavowed all his activities; he claimed again his rights to the 1905 amnesty; he even denied that he was living with Stefaniia Petrovskaia, who had admitted that she was his common-law wife. The gendarmerie at Kutaisi, Tbilisi and Baku took so long to make sense of the evidence that he was aiming to overthrow the state that he was spared life-long exile to Siberia. (Corruption may have helped; at least one Baku gendarme, Major Zaitsev, was in the pay of the local revolutionaries.) Koba also obtained phlegm from a prisoner with advanced tuberculosis, bribed the prison doctor to certify him as seriously ill and asked to be allowed to marry Stefaniia. Koba’s sentence was again
lenient: he was banned from the Caucasus for five years and handed back to the Vologda authorities as ‘a person harmful to public peace’. Consent for Koba and Stefaniia to marry came through too late, on the day he was dispatched northwards. In Solvychegodsk Koba knew no one; ironically his most faithful henchman in the future, Viacheslav Molotov, had just left the town for Vologda, the provincial capital where they met a few months later.

Having proved himself capable of robbing, killing, resisting interrogation and withstanding prison and exile, Koba was now important enough to the party in Europe to be worth rescuing: he was in 1910 picked out for the Central Committee, in case any members should risk working in Russia. Koba began writing to Lenin, pointing out that the workers, even if they preferred Lenin’s line to the law-abiding approach of Leon Trotsky, had no respect for a party which cowered in Paris cafes and Zurich libraries: ‘Let them climb up the wall as much as they feel like, but we think that those who value the movement’s interest just get on with it.’
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Koba was visited by the gendarmerie twice a day. Consolation in Solvychegodsk came from his landlady, Matriona Kuzakova, who in late 1911 gave birth to a son, perhaps Koba’s, Konstantin. On 6 July 1911 Koba was allowed to move to live under police supervision in Vologda, where there was a public library, a theatre, a left-wing newspaper and easy communications with the rest of Russia and with Bolsheviks abroad. In Vologda Koba met another exile, Piotr Chizhikov, who, while in exile further north in Totma had become engaged to a schoolgirl, Pelageiia (Polina) Georgievna Onufrieva. She followed him to Vologda and, with Chizhikov out all day, whiled away the hours with Koba.

Koba often mentioned his dead wife to Polina: ‘You can’t imagine what beautiful dresses she used to make!’
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Koba inscribed books ‘to clever, nasty Polina from Oddball Iosif’ and wrote affectionate postcards: ‘I kiss you in turn, but I don’t kiss in an ordinary way, but arrrrrdently (it’s not worth just plain kissing). Iosif.’ Stalin showed characteristic pedantry: he told her how important was William Shakespeare’s
Tempest
(as one might expect from someone who was a Caliban impersonating Prospero). He described to Polina the paintings of the Louvre. After they parted she gave him the cross she wore, and Iosif, instead of a photograph of himself, sent her pictures of bare-breasted nymphs and half-undressed
kissing couples. On his secret trip to Petersburg in August he used a passport in the name of her fiance who, although an exile, was not a wanted man.

The Okhranka now took a closer look at Koba: they decided at first not to rearrest him, but to use him as a tracer to lead them to other Bolsheviks. They let Koba reach St Petersburg, where Orjonikidze gave him a message from Lenin. In October 1911 he left again; this time, he hoped, for good. He was closely followed, arrested and so well interrogated that he gave, for almost the only time, his real date of birth. Even so, the Okhranka failed to translate the Georgian and German entries in Koba’s notebooks, and gave him a railway pass to Vologda and permission to live anywhere except St Petersburg and Moscow. The gendarmerie had so vague a description of Koba – omitting his pockmarks and crippled arm – that he could not easily be recaptured.

In Baku or Tbilisi such leniency indicated corruption. Administrative sanctions against revolutionaries were determined at the highest level – by the minister of the interior, even the Tsar – but on the basis of reports compiled by lowly captains or majors. The gendarmes and prison warders in the provinces had their tariff, from fifty roubles for letting someone impersonate a prisoner, to 800 roubles for sending the prisoner to a tolerable part of European Russia, not Siberia. In Petersburg, however, such laxity occurred for serious reasons: either the Okhranka had made its prisoner a police informer or the Okhranka wanted other revolutionaries to suspect that its prisoner was an informer.

There were even more sophisticated motives: at the Ministry of the Interior, the head of police Sergei Zubatov was infiltrating the Social Democrat and Social Revolutionary movements. Merely to bribe or blackmail revolutionaries into being police informers was futile; an effective informer such as Roman Malinovsky – soon to be a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee and the leader of the Social Democrat faction in the Duma – would be either found out or paralysed every time his information was acted on. More Mephistophelean were plans to encourage, even subsidize, extreme and fractious revolutionaries to splinter the left into feuding factions.