The months of waiting ended when the St Petersburg police sentenced Joseph Stalin to four years of exile. Marched from prison on 2 July 1913, he was taken to an arrest wagon bound for Siberia. Convicts were usually accompanied by friends and relatives who shouted support from the platform through the barred slits in the sides of the wagon. Nobody in the capital, however, was willing to bid Stalin farewell. His wife Ketevan was dead and his mother far away in Gori; and the Alliluev family, known to be active Bolshevik supporters, would have been ill advised to come to the station. No sooner had he risen to the crest of the Bolshevik faction than his fortunes fell to the ground. From having been leader of Bolshevism in St Petersburg with responsibility for both the Duma faction’s activities and the editorial line of Pravda he was reduced to being one arrested revolutionary among hundreds. Stalin was put in manacles. He slept on a hard wooden bunk. He and his comrades were fed and watered like cattle as the train made its way eastwards across the Eurasian plain. They peered through the barred slits as the train pulled out. Within minutes of departure they lost sight of the last feature of the Russian capital, the cupola on St Isaac’s Cathedral. The tundra and taiga of Siberia awaited them.1
The government was watching with concern as the slogans of Bolshevism attracted discontented factory workers, and Bolsheviks like Stalin were a threat to the Imperial order as the industrial strike movement expanded. Stalin’s convict record was also noted. The Minister of Internal Affairs had no reason to show indulgence to this leading revolutionary who had escaped several times from previous places of exile. He and his comrades were sent to Turukhansk District in Yenisei Province in Siberia’s far north-east. Turukhansk’s reputation was a dreadful one. It was the place of detention for those revolutionaries in previous decades who had broken their terms of punishment. Stalin’s periods in exile in Novaya Uda, Solvychegodsk, Vologda and Narym were going to seem pleasant in comparison. No place under Imperial administration was bleaker than Turukhansk.2
At nearly six hundred thousand square miles, Yenisei Province was larger than Britain, France and Germany combined. It stretched from the town of Yeniseisk north down the River Yenisei to the Arctic Ocean. Population was sparse in Turukhansk District. Before the First World War there were fewer than fifteen thousand inhabitants and most of these belonged to tribes which had lived there for centuries. Monastyrskoe, the district capital, had fewer than fifty houses (although the New York and Montreal fur company Revillion had a branch there and graphite mining took place further north).3 The climate was harsh. Winter with its frequent snowstorms lasted nine months; the temperature sometimes fell to sixty degrees below zero and the daylight was of short duration. Summer brought its own discomforts because the sun hardly set and the mosquitoes bit through clothing. Agriculture was impossible since the ground remained frozen regardless of season. Flour and vegetables were imported from Russia’s gentler climes and livestock husbandry was unknown. The people of Turukhansk District hunted and fished for subsistence.4
Escape from the far-flung villages was exceptionally difficult. The telegraph line, ending at Monastyrskoe, facilitated police surveillance.5 The tundra was so heavy that flight west to the River Ob or east to the River Lena was not a realistic option. Those trying to flee by river faced hazards of a different nature. The route to the north was arduous, especially in the vast stretch above the Arctic Circle. Authorities checked the identities of all passengers, boats were few and the water melted for only a few weeks annually. The southward alternative was little better. The steamship was under constant watch; and when anyone took a boat or dog-sleigh from village to village, peasants were under orders to report this to the police.6 It was over six hundred miles from Monastyrskoe to Yeniseisk and 170 miles from Yeniseisk to Krasnoyarsk. The chances of getting unnoticed all the way upriver to Krasnoyarsk were small. As a place of detention, Monastyrskoe was almost as effective as Devil’s Island or Alcatraz.7 Stalin and his fellow prisoners had plenty of time to ponder this on the journey along the Trans-Siberian Railway until they reached Krasnoyarsk.
From there they travelled downriver by steamship. Stalin had been preceded to Monastyrskoe by Yakov Sverdlov, fellow member of the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee and an acquaintance from an earlier period of exile. Both were assigned by administrative order to villages around Monastyrskoe: Stalin went to Kostino, Sverdlov to Selivanikha.8 Kostino was ten miles and Selivanikha three miles from Monastyrskoe.
A large colony of revolutionaries lived in the neighbouring villages. Most had recently arrived. Until the 1905 Revolution the Ministry of Internal Affairs had sent such convicts to Tobolsk, Narym or Yakutia. Such places had proved easy to flee from. Ill-paid policemen and impoverished peasants were seldom difficult to suborn with a small bribe. Turukhansk District had been used fitfully in the 1890s – the future Menshevik leader Yuli Martov had served his sentence there. By the time Stalin arrived, the revolutionary colony had grown. Resident exiles belonged mainly to those parties regarded as the greatest threat to political and civil order; these included not only Bolsheviks and Mensheviks but also Anarchists and Socialist-Revolutionaries. Monastyrskoe was consequently a hive of ideological variety. Dispute usually took place without undue polemics. Exiles had made up their mind about party allegiance. Each party maintained shared books and facilities among its members. Messages from Russia were passed on; pleas were made on behalf of individuals who were in poor health or who ran out of money. The revolutionaries kept intellectually alert in anticipation of eventual return to political work upon release.
Although the conditions of detention were bad under the Romanovs, they were nowhere near as oppressive as Stalin made out in the 1930s. The revolutionaries could keep up their spirits through social gatherings. Someone even composed a ‘Turukhansk March’. Its words were more stirring than poetic and the refrain went as follows:9
Boldly, brothers, boldly
Let’s meet the evil storm
With our laughter
And a song that’s brave!
The ‘evil storm’ referred less to the local weather than to the oppressive tsarist regime. Every exiled militant, while yearning to leave Siberia and overthrow the Romanovs, easily found rooms to rent. Each had a stipend of fifteen rubles a month. This was enough to cover rent, which cost about two rubles, and basic food requirements.10 But game was plentiful and the revolutionaries bought the equipment to fish and trap. They could also work for local peasants.11 Many exiles had family members in Russia who sent money; others – one of whom was Stalin – relied predominantly on being subsidised by their party. Turukhansk did not have the harshest penal regime, but it was not an easy one either.
Central Committee member Sverdlov welcomed Stalin. They knew and disliked each other from their shared exile in Narym District in 1912. Stalin was as self-absorbed as before and shut himself away from everyone. He ignored the custom of giving a detailed report on general politics and the prospects of revolution on the basis of recent direct experience in Russia. The other exiled Bolsheviks were deprived of up-to-date information which only he could supply.
Within months of Stalin’s arrival, both Stalin and Sverdlov were ordered further north. The new governor of Yenisei Province in mid-March 1914 transferred his two Bolsheviks to a still more distant place. He had been alerted to their plans to escape.12 Stalin had tried to allay suspicion by writing to Malinovski on 10 April 1914:13
Apparently someone or other is spreading the rumour that I won’t stay in exile till the end of my sentence. Rubbish! I inform you and swear like a dog that I’ll remain in exile till the end of the sentence (till 1917). Sometimes I’ve thought of leaving but now I’ve rejected the idea, rejected it definitively. There are many reasons and, if you like, I’ll write about them in detail some time.
In the same letter he offered to supply articles to Pravda on ‘The Foundations of Marxism’ and ‘The Organisational Side of the National Question’.14 But the Okhrana was not fooled. Lenin wanted Stalin and Sverdlov to be helped to leave Siberia, and quantities of money had been arriving for them at Monastyrskoe from party comrades in Russia.15
Stalin and Sverdlov would have been better served if the Central Committee had sent money not directly to them but to intermediaries. In any case the Central Committee was penetrated by spies. Okhrana agent Malinovski, with whom Stalin corresponded, told the Department of Police in St Petersburg in November 1913 about the intention to organise an escape. Stalin and Sverdlov were important detainees. By administrative order they were to be moved to the bleak hamlet of Kureika.16 There they would be the sole convicts and most of the residents would be Ostyaks.
Both were depressed. Whatever chance they had of making it up-river to Krasnoyarsk would all but disappear in Kureika. Sverdlov had particular cause to feel downcast as he explained in a letter to his sister Sarra:17
Joseph Dzhughashvili and I are being transferred a hundred kilometres to the north, eighty kilometres within the Arctic Circle. There will be only the two of us at the spot, and we’ll have two guards. They have reinforced the surveillance and cut us off from the post. The post comes once a month with a courier who is often late. In practice there are no more than eight or nine deliveries a year.
Their geographical knowledge was faulty. There were two places called Kureika north of Monastyrskoe. The one which Sverdlov had in mind was by the river of the same name far beyond the Arctic Circle. The governor had specified another Kureika, which stood on the western bank of the River Yenisei just below the line. Even so, it was seventy-five miles downriver from Monastyrskoe, and that was quite far enough to lower their spirits.18
Although the location was not as bad as they had feared, it was quite bad enough. Stalin made his own contribution to the unpleasantness. In Monastyrskoe he had taken possession of books bequeathed to resident Bolsheviks by fellow exile Innokenti Dubrovinski. When Stalin moved on to Kureika, he simply took the books off with him. Another Bolshevik, Filip Zakharov, went out to remonstrate with him and was treated ‘more or less as a tsarist general would receive a rank-and-file soldier who had dared to appear before him with a demand’.19
Stalin and Sverdlov disliked the noisiness of the Kureika family they lodged with. They had no kerosene and had to use candles if they wanted to read during the long winter.20 But the worst thing was the relationship between them. Sverdlov wrote:21 ‘One thing is that I don’t have a room to myself. There are two of us. I’ve got the Georgian Dzhughashvili with me, an old acquaintance whom I met in a previous exile. He’s a fine fellow but too big an individualist in daily life.’ ‘Individualist’ was a damning word among Marxists, who required the subordination of personal inclinations to collective needs. Driven to distraction, Sverdlov decided to move house; he wrote to a friend in May 1914:22
I have a comrade with me. But we know each other only too well. What is more, and this is the saddest thing, a person is stripped bare in front of you in conditions of exile and imprisonment and becomes exposed in every little detail. Worst of all, he is visible solely from the viewpoint of ‘the details of daily life’. There’s no room for the large features of character to reveal themselves. Now I live in a separate apartment from the com[rade], and we rarely see each other.
Sverdlov got himself transferred back to Selivanikha at the end of September on grounds of ill health.23
Stalin meanwhile got on with life in his own egocentric fashion. He had always had an eye for adolescent girls but when he moved in as a lodger with the Pereprygin family, he behaved quite scandalously by seducing the fourteen-year-old daughter. Not only that: he made her pregnant. Even in that lightly administered area it was impossible to keep things quiet. The police became involved. Stalin was interviewed, and had to agree in due course to marry the unfortunate girl. This saved him from prosecution in the courts.24He subsequently abrogated the accord. For Stalin, the relationship was no more than a way of relieving the sexual frustrations of exile. He lived like a feudal knight among the impoverished Pereprygin family and took what he fancied whenever he liked. He acted as if he had rights without obligations. He had contempt for all human conduct but his own.
His political activity was weakened by the fact that his postal contact with the world outside Kureika was intermittent.25 This was intensely irritating because war had broken out in Europe. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by a Serbian nationalist in July 1914 had provoked a general diplomatic crisis. The Austrian government had delivered a humiliating ultimatum to Serbia. Russia, which had stepped back from the brink in previous emergencies in the Balkans, decided to take the Serbian side. Austria’s expansion into the region was to be resisted at last. The complication was that Germany had opted to stand by Austria in the event of a Balkan crisis. The Russian Imperial Army mobilised and Nicholas II refused to stand it down when the Germans delivered an ultimatum to St Petersburg. Russian forces poured through East Prussia towards Berlin. Austria occupied Serbia. France and the United Kingdom honoured their treaty obligations and declared war on Russia’s side against Germany and Austria–Hungary. The German Imperial Army defended itself in the east and, violating the neutrality of Belgium, thrust across into northern France. Without anyone having intended it, a European war had broken out.
This was happening while Stalin and his fellow exiles could have no part in the campaign waged by Lenin and his supporters against Russian participation in the war against the Central Powers. Indeed Lenin from the safety of Switzerland urged all Marxists to work for the defeat of Nicholas II’s forces. Strikes were organised in factories, especially in the capital (which was renamed Petrograd because St Petersburg was thought to sound too Germanic). Bolsheviks sent antiwar propaganda to Russian POWs in German and Austrian camps. The leading Bolshevik writers debated the political and economic motivations of the belligerents in the Petrograd press. The Okhrana was active in retaliation, and the local Bolshevik groups were repeatedly broken up; and although Lenin was indefatigable, he lost many supporters to demoralisation as well as to the prison system.
Stalin, however, did not worry about such dangers; he wanted to get back into action in Russia and was intensely frustrated by his continued exile. He wrote to Malinovski appealing for help from the party:26
Greetings, friend!
I feel a bit uncomfortable writing, but needs must. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced so terrible a situation. All my money’s gone, I’ve got some sinister cough along with the worsening freezes (37 degree below), a general rundown in health; and I’ve no store of bread, sugar, meat, kerosene: all my money has gone on running expenses and clothing and footwear. Without such a store everything here is so dear: rye bread costs 4B kopeks a pound, kerosene 15 kopeks, meat 18 kopeks, sugar 25 kopeks. I need milk, I need firewood, but . . . money, I haven’t got money, friend. I don’t know how I’ll get through the winter in such a condition . . . I don’t have wealthy relatives or acquaintances and have absolutely no one to turn to, so I’m appealing to you, and not only to you but also to Petrovski and to Badaev.
He requested that these Bolshevik Duma deputies – Malinovski, Petrovski and Badaev – should send money from the ‘fund of the repressed’ which they and the Menshevik deputies maintained. Perhaps they could send him sixty rubles?
Stalin expressed his hope that Nikolai Chkheidze – leader of the Menshevik Duma deputies – might look kindly on him as a fellow Georgian.27 This was a message of despair: no one was more hated by the Georgian Mensheviks than Stalin. Meanwhile he was sorting out his thoughts in Siberia. He read voraciously; there was no time to feel sad about his fate.28 Co-opted to the Central Committee in 1912, he continued to receive financial assistance by bank transfers from Petrograd. Despite the Okhrana’s persecuting attentiveness, the Bolshevik faction did not cease to tend to Stalin, Sverdlov and others.29 The local police oversaw such transactions. The regularity of the transfers, being no secret to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, naturally gave rise to the suspicion that Stalin was secretly planning an escape. He would need to bribe policemen and pay for rail tickets if this was to be successful.
If ever he made it back to Petrograd, he knew he could count on help from Sergei and Olga Alliluev (whose youngest daughter Nadya was to become his second wife after the October Revolution). He wrote affectionately to Olga on 25 November 1915:30
I’m so very grateful to you, deeply respected Olga Yevgenevna, for your good and pure feelings towards me. I shall never forget your caring attitude to me! I look forward to the moment when I’m liberated from exile and can come to Petersburg [as the Bolsheviks continued to call the capital] and personally thank you and Sergei for everything. I’ve only got two years at most left.
I received the parcel. Thank you. I only ask one thing: don’t waste any more on me; you yourselves need the money. I’ll be happy if from time to time you send postcards with scenes of nature and the like. Nature in this accursed district is appallingly barren – the river in the summer and snow in winter are all nature provides here, and I’m driven mad with longing for scenes of nature even if they are only on paper.
Stalin did not often behave gracefully, but he could when he wanted.
He was not entirely removed from active politics. The trial of the Bolshevik Duma faction and its adviser Lev Kamenev in early 1915 in Petrograd had brought disruption to Bolshevism. The charges related to both politics and revolutionary etiquette. Instead of just denouncing the Imperial government, Kamenev had distanced himself from Lenin’s policy that the best result in the war for the European Marxist movement would be the defeat of the Russian armed forces by the Germans. Even so, Kamenev could not escape a sentence of Siberian exile. On arrival in Turukhansk District he was again put on ‘party trial’. The proceedings took place in Monastyrskoe, and Sverdlov and Stalin were present, as were the members of the Bolshevik Duma fraction. Most participants chose to support Lenin’s policy.31 Stalin was friends with Kamenev; they remained on these terms throughout their Siberian exile and for several years subsequently. Stalin, though, jibbed at Kamenev’s failure in open court in Petrograd to show solidarity with the faction’s official policy. Probably Stalin had reservations about Lenin’s calls for ‘European Civil War’ as a realistic policy both militarily and politically; but Kamenev needed to be pulled back into line. Discipline was discipline. Kamenev had committed an infringement and had to be punished.
Stalin started to enjoy life in Kureika. He took up fishing: this brought an enhancement of his diet as well as genuine pleasure. He had had lessons from the Ostyak men and soon, according to his own account, got better at it than the Ostyaks themselves. Supposedly they asked him what his secret was.32 In any case, he was locally accepted and became known as Osip (or, less pleasantly, as Pockmarked Oska).33
Fishing in Siberian exile could be dangerous, as he later recalled:34 ‘It happened that the tempest caught me on the river. At one time it seemed that I was done for. But I made it to the bank. I didn’t believe I’d get there: the river was in great tumult.’ On another occasion a snowstorm blew up. He had had a good day by the water along with Ostyaks from his village and had a large haul of sturgeon and sea-salmon.35 Foolishly he went off home before the others. The storm – known in Siberia as a purga – blew up suddenly. It was too late to turn back and it was a long way in nearly blinding conditions to Kureika. If he had been sensible, he would have abandoned the fish. But the fish were his food for the month; and anyway Stalin was stubborn. He trudged through the heavy snow, head down into the bitter wind. By the light of a new moon he thought he glimpsed shadowy figures near by; he called out to them, relying on the local tradition of helping strangers in a mess. But the figures moved on. They were in fact the villagers with their dogs whom he had left earlier; and when they saw the snow-covered, gesticulating form, they credulously assumed it was a water demon. Stalin himself was not sure that the figures had been human beings and did not try to catch up with them.36
He trudged on by himself. There was a distinct possibility he would not be able to find the village even if he survived the cold. But he got there. Unfortunately he was still an apparition in white, from his bearded face down to his boots. Dragging himself to the nearest hut, he was a bizarre sight. ‘Osip,’ one of the villagers cried, pressing himself against the wall in fright, ‘is that you?’ Stalin replied: ‘Of course it’s me. And it’s not a wood spirit!’37 For millions of peasants in the Russian Empire retained the ancient pagan superstitions even if they belonged to the Orthodox Church or some other Christian denomination. Belief in spirits, devils and witches was widespread, and in eastern Siberia the Church had made little impact upon popular notions. Stalin had yet again been reminded that he lived in a society where the ideas of the Enlightenment were as yet thinly spread. He thawed out; he ate and drank. Then he took to his bed and slept for eighteen hours.38
He told another of his stories many years later. At a 1935 Kremlin reception he narrated how he was sitting on the river bank as men of the village went off fishing at the start of the spring floods on the River Yenisei. When they returned, they were one man short. They did not draw attention to this; but Stalin questioned them and was told the missing man had drowned. What struck Stalin, he said, was how little they thought about the death. If he had not mentioned the subject, they would have gone back to their huts without comment. Stalin pondered the event. He felt sure that if a cow had been sick, they would have gone out and tried to save it. But the loss of a man for them was a ‘triviality’. The point was, he said, that it was easy to make a man whereas animals were a more complex task.39 This was nonsense. Perhaps Stalin thought so too; but the fact that he repeated it about two decades later meant that he either believed it or had invented it and decided it suited his current political interest: in the mid-1930s he wished to stress the importance of conserving Bolshevik cadres.40
Stalin remembered his time in exile with fondness. Despite what he claimed in his begging letters to party comrades, he was generally healthy. He was treated as a respected visiting member of a community. For the first time he was living closely for a lengthy period with non-Georgians and non-intellectuals. Most were Ostyaks, but a number were Russians. This experience would serve him well when, years later, he became their political overlord. For the rest of his life he talked about his days in Siberia, the fishing, the climate, the conversations and the people. These experiences, even though he was there against his will, uplifted him. He enjoyed the wonder and admiration shown him by the Kureika villagers. They knew he was a ‘southerner’, but had no idea where Georgia was. They saw he loved books: in a culture of oral tradition this in itself marked him off as a man apart. Even his pipe was an object of awe. Sitting in the hut in the evening, he would pass it round for others to take a puff. Visitors to the villagers popped round specifically to try out this locally unusual mode of smoking. Having chatted with the renowned revolutionary in their midst, they departed happy.41
Obviously contact with the central leadership of the Bolshevik faction grew ever trickier in the Great War. In 1915 Stalin and Suren Spandaryan, a fellow Central Committee member, wrote to Lenin. Stalin’s part of the letter went as follows:42
My greetings to you, dear Vladimir Ilich, the very warmest greetings! Greetings to Zinoviev, greetings to Nadezhda Konstantinovna! How are things, how is your health? I live as previously, I munch my bread and am getting through half the sentence. It’s boring but what can be done about it? And how are things with you? You must be having a gayer time . . . I recently read Kropotkin’s articles – the old scoundrel has gone completely off his head. I’ve also read a little article by Plekhanov in Rech – what an incorrigible, blabbing old woman! Eh! . . . And the Liquidators with their [Duma] deputy-agents of the Free Economic Society? There’s no one to give them a beating, the Devil knows! Surely they won’t remain unpunished like this?! Cheer us up and inform us that soon there’ll be an organ to give them a right good thrashing straight in their gobs – and without respite.
This was the rant of a man wanting to show off his militant style to his leader. The references to beating were repetitious. The frustrations of exile leaped off the page. Stalin hoped to impress on Lenin that, when his term of exile ended, he could be a useful right-hand man for him in the Russian political underground; but he did not miss the opportunity to remind Lenin how different their circumstances were.
Exile had its bright moments for Stalin, but generally it brought the worst out of him. He was an emotionally needy person: people around him were also liable to be subjected to the lash of his tongue or simply to daily insensitivity and egotism. He belonged to a revolutionary party which made a virtue of placing individual satisfaction below the needs of the collective good. It was a party which also cherished comradely good humour. Stalin was not really unsociable. He had friends. He liked a joke and was an amusing mimic. But his friends had to acknowledge his primacy. Stalin had a deep need to dominate. This was why his fellow exiles found him exasperating. At close quarters he was painful to deal with; the Siberian sojourn concentrated everyone’s attention on the uncongenial sides of his character which in other circumstances they overlooked because of the perceived benefits he brought to the cause of Revolution.