émigré leaders of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party had been slow to recognise Joseph Dzhughashvili as a leader of any talent. The elite’s composition was not fixed in stone, but without patronage from one of its members it was difficult for anyone to join it. Dzhughashvili did not help himself by staying in the south Caucasus and Russia. At gatherings in Tampere and Stockholm he had been forthright in his opinions. On each occasion he had made objection to Lenin,1 who was the only leader who was ever likely to suggest including him in the Central Committee. Lenin’s focus remained on Russia; he was even willing to leave Georgia to the local Mensheviks if only they agreed to keep their noses out of Russian Marxist affairs.2 Dzhughashvili dissented. For him, the industrial and commercial expansion in Baku, Tbilisi and Batumi gave the region an importance equal to the regions of central and northern Russia; and he did not change this attitude until the Bolshevik faction gave him jobs elsewhere. What was already clear was his willingness to stand up for his opinions at party gatherings outside the region. He had not joined the Marxist movement to bury his mind under the bushel of official policy.
Promotion, when it came, proceeded from the hands of Lenin. After years of uneasy and patchy co-operation with the Mensheviks Lenin had had enough. By 1911 the disadvantages of sharing a party with them as well as with the various non-Russian regional organisations outweighed the advantages. Essentially he was planning to turn the Bolshevik faction – or rather those Bolsheviks who stayed loyal to him – into the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party and to treat all other factions as if they had placed themselves outside the party’s ranks.
The Mensheviks had denounced Lenin’s sanctioning of bank robberies as a means of financing Bolshevism. They also wanted their share of the money owed to the party as a whole from the legacies inherited from two sisters called Schmidt. But Lenin aimed to hold all the funds in Bolshevik hands. This was not the only problem. The non-Russian Marxist parties – the Poles, Latvians and Lithuanians and the Jewish Bund – were causing trouble by criticising his policies. Even inside the Bolshevik faction there was dissent. Lenin had expelled Alexander Bogdanov from its midst only to find that many Bolsheviks continued to regard such schismatism as unnecessary and counter-productive. Never having been short of confidence and cunning, Lenin convoked a gathering in Prague. Despite ensuring that all but a couple of participants would be Leninist loyalists, he called it a Party Conference. Essentially he was abandoning even the semblance of collaboration within the same party as the Mensheviks. Proceedings started in January 1912. Lenin’s divisive tactics disconcerted delegates and some did not shirk from condemning his obsessive émigré polemics. But he got his way. A Party Central Committee was elected and Lenin set about acting as if the Mensheviks did not exist.
Dzhughashvili was stranded at the time in Vologda; but the town was on a direct rail route to St Petersburg and Lenin was far from having forgotten him. A ‘party school’ had been held by Lenin in 1911 at Longjumeau outside Paris, and Dzhughashvili was one of the individuals he had wanted to have with him. ‘People like him’, he said to the Georgian Menshevik Giorgi Uratadze, ‘are exactly what I need.’3 Longjumeau was a quiet village where Lenin had devised a programme of lectures and recruited several Marxist lecturers, in addition to himself, to train younger Bolsheviks in the niceties of party doctrines and history. The objective was to inculcate an unflinching loyalty to Bolshevism among the students; and Dzhughashvili, who had yet to make his mark as a Bolshevik writer at the faction’s higher levels, was a natural choice. Another Georgian Bolshevik in Lenin’s sights was Dzhughashvili’s future associate Sergo Ordzhonikidze, who studied at Longjumeau and impressed him. Somehow or other, though, Dzhughashvili did not receive an invitation. Perhaps Lenin simply failed to get anyone to go with the message to Vologda. Ordzhonikidze at any rate impressed Lenin in Longjumeau to such an extent that he entrusted him with the practical arrangements of convoking the Prague Conference.4
Had Dzhughashvili attended the Longjumeau course, he would perhaps have been given this task. He would almost certainly have gone to Prague and might even have been elected to the Central Committee. He had a broader range of skills, especially as a writer and editor, than his friend Ordzhonikidze. Yet such an election would not have done him a favour. The new Central Committee included a certain Roman Malinovski, who was a paid agent of the Okhrana. All those Central Committee members who returned to the Russian Empire, except for Malinovski, had been arrested within weeks. It was also in 1912 that Malinovski, a leading trade-unionist among the metalworkers of St Petersburg, stood as Bolshevik candidate for the Fourth State Duma and won a handsome victory. The Okhrana was able to stay informed about the most influential bodies of Bolshevism – the Central Committee and the Duma faction – and to influence their discussions.
The arrest of most returning members of the Central Committee, however, turned the fortunes of Joseph Stalin. Having missed the chance to attend the Longjumeau party school or the Prague Conference, he was available for activity at the highest level of the Bolshevik faction. Lenin saw him as a man who could act for him in several capacities. Dzhughashvili was an organiser of good repute. He never complained about assignments: already his capacity for hard work was well known. Although he had had disagreements with Lenin on policy, he was not unusual in this, and anyway they concurred in 1911–12 on most practical matters affecting the Bolsheviks. He had a basic understanding of Marxist theory. He was a fluent writer and an able editor. He had a forthright manner whenever someone had to pull an individual or committee into compliance with the faction’s official line. Lenin and Grigori Zinoviev, who were temporarily in Paris before moving the Central Committee’s foreign base to Kraków in the Polish lands of the Habsburg Monarchy, decided to co-opt Dzhughashvili (or Ivanovich, as they currently referred to him) to the Central Committee. Sergo Ordzhonikidze was sent in February 1912 to Vologda to tell him the news in person.5
Communication with the emigration was slow and Lenin fretted: ‘There’s no word of Ivanovich. What’s happened to him? Where is he now? How is he?’6 By then Dzhughashvili was classified as one of the rare useful comrades. But Lenin need not have worried. Ordzhonikidze easily found the co-opted comrade in Vologda and informed him that the Central Committee wanted him to flee the town and work as one of its main leaders in the Russian Empire. At last he had joined the elite of the Bolshevik faction.
Dzhughashvili left Vologda with false papers on 29 February 1912. His first stay was in the Caucasus. There he wrote material justifying the formation of the new Central Committee despite the fact that the Mensheviks and other factions of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party had been illegitimately excluded from membership. He concentrated his efforts in Baku and Tbilisi. But his fresh duties meant that he was no longer to confine himself to one region of the Russian Empire. On 1 April he left by arrangement with Lenin for Moscow, where he met up with Ordzhonikidze. Then he went on to St Petersburg. His duties were onerous and important. He wrote for and helped to edit the Bolshevik newspaper Zvezda (‘The Star’); his literary fluency was much appreciated by the hard-pressed metropolitan Bolsheviks. At the same time he liaised with Bolshevik deputies to the Third State Duma seeking to found a more popular daily, Pravda (‘The Truth’). Dzhughashvili became its editor. There were three working rooms at the newspaper’s headquarters and the printing press had two rooms elsewhere.7 He can hardly be said to have kept out of sight of the Okhrana. He had to hope that the police, for reasons of their own, would not want to arrest him.
Pravda appeared for the first time on 22 April 1912, and Dzhughashvili had contributed an article, ‘Our Aims’, to the issue. He had done as he was told from Kraków and inserted himself into the core of the St Petersburg Bolshevik leadership. Pravda was the faction’s legal daily newspaper. Its objective was to gather support among industrial workers for Bolshevism at a time of rising popular discontent with the Tsar and employers. Miners on strike in the Lena goldfields in Siberia had been shot by the authorities on 4 April. A wave of protest demonstrations swept across the empire. St Petersburg was in tumult. The long period of quiescence in the labour movement since 1906 was at an end. Bolshevik militants started to outmatch the Mensheviks in political appeals. Consequently the Bolsheviks ceased to be of use to the Okhrana as a divisive force in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. It may have been no coincidence that orders were put out for Dzhug-hashvili’s arrest as soon as Pravda started to be sold. The truth has not yet been unearthed from the files of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Dzhughashvili was arrested on 22 April and confined in the House of Preliminary Detention in the capital. On 2 July he was sent under escort to Narym District near Tomsk in western Siberia, where he was sentenced to remain for three years. After the long journey by ‘arrest wagon’ on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Tomsk he was put on board the Kolpashevets steamer and taken down the great River Ob towards Narym.
Until his confinement Dzhughashvili had been writing more intensively than in any previous period of his life. It was also in this period that some of his adolescent verses were reprinted in the latest edition of Yakob Gogebashvili’s Georgian literary anthologyMother Tongue.8 But he told no one about this. (It is not even certain that he himself knew about the publication.) Just a few flashes of his poetic side still occurred. In a proclamation he wrote for May Day 1912 he declared:9 ‘Nature is waking from its winter’s sleep. The forests and mountains are turning green. Flowers adorn the meadows and pastures. The sun shines more warmly. We feel in the air new life, and the world is beginning to dance for joy.’ This was the last romantic outburst he made in print. For the rest of his life he never repeated such gushing verbosity. Indeed it had been a long time since he had indulged himself in this way.10
The same proclamation referred to none of the regions of the Russian Empire except Russia. It was aimed exclusively at Russian workers and called on them to ‘raise the banner of the Russian [russkoi] revolution’. Too much weight of interpretation cannot be placed on this. (Not that this has stopped some biographers from trying.) Dzhughashvili was working in the Russian capital, writing in Russian and appealing to Russian industrial workers. Naturally Russia was at the core of his message, as would not have been the case if he had still been in Tbilisi. Nevertheless there was a detectable shift in his political persona around this time. His main pseudonym from 1912 was Stalin. This was an unmistakably Russian name derived from the word for steel (stal). Although it was not the first time he had turned to the Russian tongue for a false identity, he had usually reverted to Georgian ones. Now, though, he was building up his image in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party and no longer wanted to be known merely as a man from the Caucasus. He was laying ever greater emphasis on the need for a general solution to the problems of the Russian Empire; and he wanted to play an integrated part in that solution.
Stalin in person, of course, was not credible as a Russian. He knew he looked, sounded and behaved in a ‘southern’ manner. He revered Georgian literary classics. He would never be Russian. And, contrary to what is widely suggested, he did not really try.11 If he had really desired to de-Georgianise his political profile among Bolsheviks he would have ceased to write on the ‘national question’. Jews like Zinoviev and Kamenev wanted to be known as internationalists and hardly ever drew attention to their ethnic ancestry. Stalin too wished to be regarded as an internationalist; he also aimed to be taken seriously in Russian socialist politics. But he continued to urge the party to promote the interests of the non-Russians under a future socialist administration. His 1913 booklet The National Question and Social-Democracy was to do much to raise his reputation in the party; it also solidified his relationship with Lenin, who described him in a letter to the writer Maxim Gorki as ‘the wonderful Georgian’.12 What is clear is that Stalin had long ceased to make a special case for the Georgians in his statements on the national question. When he wrote or said anything, he treated them no better or worse than other non-Russian peoples. He offered his co-nationals no prospect of preferment, while himself remaining a Georgian in appearance, accent, demeanour and residual culture.
This meant little to Stalin as he made his way under guard to Narym. He stayed for a few days in Kolpashevo, a village where several leading Bolsheviks were living in exile. They included Mikhail Lashevich and Ivan Smirnov. Stalin also came across his Bolshevik friend Semën Surin as well as his Bailov Prison acquaintance Semën Vereshchak: he had supper with them, recuperated and then set out north-east along the River Ob to his assigned destination in Narym.13 It was not quite the worst place of exile in the Russian Empire. Narym, unlike towns at a more northerly latitude, lay just within the zone of agriculture. But conditions could have been better. The winter was bleak. Economic life largely revolved around hunting and fishing. Contact with St Petersburg was infrequent and subject to police surveillance.
Fellow Central Committee member Yakov Sverdlov greeted Stalin in Narym and offered him a room. They did not get on well. Even the agreement on housework broke down. Whereas Sverdlov aimed at a modicum of order, Stalin was slovenly and selfish. They had agreed to fetch the post, and whoever stayed behind was expected to tidy the house. Years later they compared memories about how Stalin got out of this arrangement:14
Stalin: I liked to creep out for the post on [Sverdlov’s day to do it]. Sverdlov had to look after the house whether he liked it or not – keep the stove alight and do the cleaning . . . How many times I tried to trick you and get out of the housework. I [also] used to wake up when it was my turn and lie still as if asleep.
Sverdlov: And do you think I didn’t notice? I noticed only too well.
Although Sverdlov laughed good-naturedly, he had not thought it pleasant at the time. Stalin’s behaviour was doubly selfish. Whoever walked to the post office would meet up with other comrades and gain a respite from the dreariness of exile. Everyone found the conditions depressing and Stalin’s egocentricity was widely resented.
The two of them planned to flee from Narym to resume clandestine political activity. They were encouraged in this by the Central Committee in Kraków. Two escape ‘bureaux’ existed, one in Kolpashevo, the other in Narym. Sverdlov made the first attempt but was caught near Tomsk. Then Lashevich made a dash, followed by Stalin and Sverdlov on 1 September.15 It was an eventful trip. They had devised a clever scheme requiring the diminutive Sverdlov to hide in a laundry basket. Stalin was accosted by a gendarme who made a move to examine the basket by pushing his bayonet into it. Stalin got him to desist by bribing him. This story, told by Stalin three decades later, cannot be verified.16 But it is not implausible. Fugitive revolutionaries regularly exploited inefficiency and venality among the Imperial agencies of law and order.
Stalin and Sverdlov stayed with the Alliluev family in St Petersburg.17 Quickly they restored links with party organisations in the empire and with the ‘foreign’ part of the Central Committee in Kraków. All this time they had to keep at least one step in front of the Okhrana. The electoral campaign for the Fourth State Duma was in full cry and Stalin stayed in the capital to help and direct Bolshevik activities. He also began writing again for Pravda. On 19 October he contributed the leading article on ‘The Will of the Voters’ Delegates’; and Lenin printed his piece ‘The Mandate of the St Petersburg Workers’ in the émigré newspaper Sotsial-demokrat. On election day, 25 October, the Bolsheviks did well by securing six seats. The need for co-ordination was paramount and Stalin made a last-minute trip to Bolsheviks in Moscow to confer with Roman Malinovski and other newly elected individuals. With the ending of the electoral campaign it was equally urgent to strengthen contact with Kraków. Stalin, after briefly returning to St Petersburg and assuring himself that arrangements for the Duma were in place, bought train tickets for Poland in early November. He was going to consult Lenin. For the first time they would meet as fellow members of the Central Committee.
The trip was memorable for Stalin. As the train approached the border with Austrian Poland, he found himself in a carriage with a passenger reading aloud from a Russian nationalist newspaper. He could not stop himself from shouting across at him: ‘Why are you reading that rubbish? You should read other newspapers!’18 Alighting from the train, he had to get help in crossing the border to Kraków. He wandered around the market till he bumped into a friendly cobbler. Stalin used his charm: ‘My father was also a cobbler, back in my homeland, Georgia.’ The cobbler, refusing any recompense, took Stalin to his home, fed him and at dusk escorted him by a winding route across the hills into Austrian Poland.19
He arrived in time for a meeting between the Central Committee members and three Bolshevik Duma deputies. Stalin did not enjoy the experience. In November there had been a Bolshevik plan to organise a one-day political strike and demonstration outside the Tauride Palace in St Petersburg. When the Mensheviks opposed this as being dangerous and unproductive, the Bolshevik faction had backed down. Lenin heard about this in Kraków and drafted an angry article.20 His ill temper had not spent itself before the three Duma deputies arrived in Poland. Stalin agreed that the Bolshevik faction had made a mistake, but he doubted that the best way to bring them into line was to browbeat them:21
Ilich recommends ‘a hard policy’ for the group of six [Bolshevik Duma deputies] inside the faction, a policy of threatening the majority of the faction, a policy of appealing to the rank and file against the faction’s majority; but Ilich will give way since it is self-evident that the [Bolshevik] six are not yet well enough developed for such a hard policy, that they are not prepared and that it’s necessary to start by strengthening the six and then use them to thrash the majority of the faction as Ilya [Muromets] used a Tatar to thrash the Tatars.
Stalin believed that the Bolsheviks could win over the Mensheviks in the Duma faction. He had attended a faction meeting and could testify that this was feasible. Persuasion really could work. Stalin thought Lenin inept and ill informed to insist on tactical intransigence.22
On much friendlier terms with Stalin was Lev Kamenev, an acquaintance from their Tbilisi days as well as a Central Committee member. Feeling lonely in Kraków, Stalin wrote him what can only be called a billet-doux:23 ‘I give you an Eskimo kiss on the nose. The Devil take me! I miss you – I swear to it like a dog. There’s no one, absolutely no one, to have a heart-to-heart conversation with, damn you. Can’t you somehow or other make it over here to Kraków?’ Still strengthening his position in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party leadership, he was reaching out to potential friends who could help him.
Having returned briefly to St Petersburg, Stalin worked with the six Bolshevik Duma deputies before travelling again to Kraków at the end of December for a further meeting of the Central Committee with the Bolshevik Duma group. He stayed abroad for the longest time in his life and got on to more amicable terms with Lenin. Yet despite being invited to eat with Lenin and his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, he insisted on finding a restaurant. Puzzled by this reaction, Lenin went in search of him. He found him eating with a bottle of beer on the table. From then onwards Lenin ensured that alcohol was provided at his home and they resumed their political conversations in a social setting. Meanwhile Stalin’s behaviour became material for local ribaldry. Ordering a meal in Russian at a train station on the line between Kraków and Zakopane, he noticed that other customers entered the restaurant and got served while he was kept waiting. He received his soup after an inordinate wait. Offended, he turned the bowl upside down and walked out. Lenin had to explain to him, supposedly the party expert on the national question, that Poles disliked having to speak Russian.24
Lenin had the knack of putting Bolsheviks at their social ease, and Stalin steadily settled down. The two of them conversed endlessly. Stalin fitted Lenin’s bill as a quintessential Bolshevik. He was tough and uncomplaining. (As yet Stalin had not displayed his self-pitying, ranting side.) He appeared to conform to a working-class stereotype. He was also a committed revolutionary and a Bolshevik factional loyalist. Stalin was obviously bright and Lenin, who was engaged in controversy with Zhordania and other Mensheviks on the national question, encouraged Stalin to take time out from his duties to write up a lengthy piece on the subject. Already in 1910 Lenin had cited Stalin (under the pseudonym K.S.) as a more authoritative commentator on the Caucasus than the more famous Zhordania.25 Now he encouraged him to deepen his researches and publish the result.
With this in mind Stalin in the second half of January 1913 travelled on to Vienna, where he could use libraries with fuller holdings in Marxist literature than were available in Kraków. He stayed for a few weeks with fellow Bolsheviks on the southern edge of the city, not far from the palace of Schönbrunn, in a first-floor flat on the Schönbrunnerschlosss-trasse. Stalin’s comrades had got lots of books ready for him. He was given a desk and a divan.26 (Stalin never objected to sleeping on the simplest frames.)27 For several weeks he read in Viennese libraries and wrote up his work in the flat. He frequently consulted local comrades about the German-language texts of Bauer, Kautsky and the Marxist journal Die Neue Zeit.28 Stalin was a man on a mission. He lived the national question and expatiated about it even on social occasions. Six-year-old Galina, the daughter of his Bolshevik hosts, got thoroughly bored on their walks in Vienna’s well-kept parks: ‘You’re not talking about the nation again!’29 Stalin, cut off from his son Yakob in Georgia, took to Galina as he did to other lively children. She was his match: she did not believe him when, with his heavy accent, he teasingly promised to bring her some ‘green chocolate’ from the Caucasus.30
He took extensive notes and wrote up most of the text of his booklet before returning to Russia. Initially he published ‘The National Question and Social-Democracy’ in the St Petersburg Marxist journal Prosveshchenie (‘Enlightenment’).31 Back in the capital in mid-February 1913, Stalin resumed his part in the complex game played between the revolutionary parties and the Okhrana. The police had long ago accepted that a policy of total suppression of the revolutionary movement would not work, and indeed they had acted on this awareness since the 1880s. (The problem was that the Okhrana could change the rules of the game at will, and the result could be prison or exile for individual revolutionaries.) Stalin had to take the usual risks. This time he stayed not in the less savoury districts of the capital but in the centre, at 44 Shpalernaya Street, in the rented apartment of the Bolshevik Duma deputies F. Samoilov and Alexander Badaev.32 The Okhrana was aware that Stalin was carrying out instructions of the émigré leadership in Kraków – or at least that he was doing so to the degree that he wished. Stalin realised that the Okhrana knew who he was and what he was up to. The Okhrana hoped to get clues about wider circles of Bolshevik activity; Stalin aimed to give no clues while continuing to guide the Duma faction towards the desired end.
Evidently his presence in St Petersburg was no secret. At any time he could be arrested. With Lenin’s blessing, he was directing the faction’s activity in the capital. He could hardly, however, strut about. He had to be wary. The fact of his voluntary obscurity in 1912–13 led many to go on supposing that he was a nonentity among Bolsheviks before the Great War. Such an idea was seriously awry. He had risen to the summit of the Central Committee and saw his talents as lying in the work he could do in the Russian Empire.
The inevitable happened on 23 February 1913. Stalin went to a ball for International Women’s Day at the Kalashnikov Exchange. It was a big occasion and many militants were heading for the same destination. The Okhrana, however, had decided that the time had come to arrest him. Apparently Malinovski had tipped off his controllers about Stalin’s whereabouts that day, and he was grabbed and handcuffed on arrival. He had finished his lengthy article on ‘The National Question and Social-Democracy’ (which was later republished as Marxism and the National Question) and delivered it to the offices of Prosveshchenie in the capital.33 This was a legally published Marxist journal that carried items of doctrinal theory and contemporary analysis. The fact that its editors welcomed his article was a signal of his rising importance among Marxists of the Russian Empire. The piece was thought sufficiently impressive to be turned out as a booklet. Stalin had also left behind an article, much briefer, for Pravda.34 This was a report on ‘The Situation in the Social-Democratic Group in the Duma’. Its contents justified the harsh line taken by the Bolsheviks in comparison with the Mensheviks. Stalin himself was out of action in the capital’s House of Preliminary Detention.
He was not to know that he would not taste freedom’s delights again for exactly four years; for it was to be precisely on International Women’s Day in 1917 that female textile workers went on strike in the capital and forged the first link in a chain that pulled down the Imperial monarchy some days later. No further works by Stalin were printed between his arrest and Nicholas II’s abdication. Scarcely had he penetrated the central precincts of the Bolshevik faction when he was cast to the winds of tsarist justice. He had known the risks. Recurrent arrest and exile were the norm for the revolutionaries who did not emigrate. He must have hoped that he would be sent again to somewhere like Solvychegodsk or Narym and that the Central Committee would enable him to escape and resume his important political functions. He would not be put on trial. His immediate future depended on the police. Stalin awaited the decision with his customary fortitude.