The Imperial monarchy confronted an emergency situation by early 1905. On 9 January there had been a political demonstration in St Petersburg. Its purpose was to present the Emperor with a petition for the granting of general civic rights. The result was a massacre when the security forces were ordered to fire on the demonstrators. Scores of people were killed. Nicholas II was not to blame for the carnage, but across the country he was held responsible. Police and army stood by helplessly as protest meetings were held. Strikes broke out. Poland and Georgia were focal points of unrest. Peasants moved to assert themselves against the landed gentry. The monarch and his ministers, already discredited by the defeats in the unfinished war with Japan, suddenly looked vulnerable. Workers elected their own councils (or ‘soviets’). The armed forces along the Trans-Siberian Railway were in mutinous mood. The efforts of the Okhrana were futile: political parties operated with decreasing fear of arrest, and although their contact with most people had been frail in previous years, they quickly attained popular confidence. This was a trial of strength with the Romanov regime unprecedented since the Pugachëv revolt of 1773–5.
For the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party the surprise was as great as it was for every other political group. Lenin in Switzerland was taken aback; so too were his followers in St Petersburg and the rest of the Russian Empire. Yet most émigrés were cautious about returning until after Nicholas II issued his October Manifesto promising reforms. In the meantime the revolutionary militants were left to their own devices. The Bolsheviks held a self-styled Third Party Congress in London in April 1905 and fixed their general strategy. They aimed at armed uprising and the formation of a provisional revolutionary dictatorship. They aspired to the total expropriation of land belonging to the monarchy, Church and gentry.
Dzhughashvili was not among the Georgian participants: he had not yet allayed the doubts about him among Bolsheviks. It was his friend and senior comrade Mikha Tskhakaya who headed the country’s group, and Tskhakaya did not fail to criticise the growing cult of Lenin in the Bolshevik faction. There was a practical aspect to this. Many Congress delegates, objecting to Lenin’s reluctance to shift the Central Committee’s base to Russia, thought the émigrés had become too comfortable abroad; and they succeeded in getting a commitment to such a transfer. Dzhughashvili, back in Georgia, was among those who argued that, if revolution was to succeed, maximum resources had to be concentrated in the Russian Empire. He had been coming back into his own before the revolutionary outbreaks. He travelled to Baku and Kutaisi before basing himself in Tbilisi. He published articles in the recently founded Proletarians Brdzola (‘Proletarian Struggle’), including one on the national question which stayed within official Bolshevik lines. He wrote to the Bolsheviks in emigration. When strikes and demonstrations were held after Bloody Sunday on 9 January 1905, he threw himself into a frenzy of writing and organising – and he was a leader of the Bolshevik Tiflis Committee whose policy of armed uprising separated them definitively from the city’s Mensheviks. Sometimes this involved him in open disputations about the respective merits of Bolshevism and Menshevism; on other occasions he put the general Marxist case against the party’s local rivals: the Anarchists, the Social-Federalists and the Socialist-Revolutionaries. Everywhere he went in the Georgian capital he was in the thick of things.
For many of his comrades, though, he was still excessively willing to make compromises on the ‘national question’. When he refused to help them in their dispute in the party’s Caucasian Union Committee in line with local Bolshevik policy, Sergei Kavtaradze accused him of being a ‘traitor’. But Dzhughashvili was unmoved. For him, Kavtaradze and others failed to separate matters of primary and secondary importance. ‘I don’t intend to have a dispute with the Union Committee over this . . . But you do as you like.’ With that he lit up a cheap cigarette and stared unblinkingly at Kavtaradze; he wanted his critics to know that he would not be pushed around again. Kavtaradze understood the gesture and never forgot it.1 Dzhughashvili was a fellow who would fight battles only when there was a decent chance of winning them. Ideological rectitude was all very well. But practical results were also important, and unnecessary squabbles should be avoided. His difficulty lay in his inability to gather a group of followers around him. In his eyes, the Georgian Bolsheviks were too rigid in their Leninism whereas the Georgian Mensheviks had the wrong policies.
When revolution had come to the south Caucasus, it took the regional authorities as much by surprise as it did elsewhere. I. I. Vorontsov-Dashkov was sent as viceroy and found himself in an invidious situation. Strikes and demonstrations affected nearly all towns and industrial settlements. Resistance to the Imperial forces was widespread. The strongest revolutionary impetus came from Noe Zhordania and the Georgian Mensheviks, who put themselves forward as both Marxists and national defenders against Russian power. The villages of Guria in western Georgia were especially responsive to the appeal of Menshevism. But everywhere in the Caucasus there were national and ethnic stirrings. On both sides of the mountain chain previously suppressed leaders emerged to challenge Nicholas II and his government. Not everywhere was the conflict characterised by tensions with St Petersburg. Inter-ethnic tensions, long contained by Russian armed forces and the straitjacket of the growing capitalist economy, snapped the patience of society. In the north Caucasus, religious traditionalism came to the fore and violence between Islamists and their rivals grew in intensity. Around the great oil city of Baku the mutual hatred of Armenians and Azeris burst into terrible violence as the Moslem Azeris massacred the Christian Armenians despite the precautions taken by Vorontsov-Dashkov.2
The Armenians in Baku, as in Tbilisi, were led by persons of the greatest wealth, whereas Azeris were typically the poorest section of the labour force. Vorontsov did not underestimate the difficulties and decided to minimise the use of violence to secure the restoration of Imperial order in the south Caucasus.3 Elsewhere in the Russian Empire in the last quarter of 1905 the armed forces were intensively at work. The workers’ soviets were being vigorously suppressed and the armed uprising of the Moscow Soviet was ruthlessly put down. Peasant rebels were being rounded up. The rebel cities in ‘Russian’ Poland were brought to heel. Mutineers in army and navy were arrested and shot. Georgia revolted. Zhordania and his Mensheviks, as well as Bolsheviks such as Dzhughashvili, exulted. Their organisations swelled with recruits. They ceased to hide their activities and the Viceroy moved steadily to a combination of force and consultation. Georgian Marxists dominated the political scene. They did not aim at secession any more than the Bolsheviks. Georgia’s fate in their estimation was tied up with revolutionary developments in Russia.
But Dzhughashvili had made his choice: the Bolshevik strategy seemed the most commendable to him. What struck his acquaintances about him was his extraordinary polemical crudity. He had little in the way of wit. His speeches, such as he gave, were dry and aggressive. He aligned himself strongly with Bolshevism and deeply detested the Mensheviks he encountered. ‘Against them,’ he declared, ‘any methods are good!’4 He distinguished himself in his practical capacities; and, with the exception of Lev Trotski who led the Petersburg Soviet from autumn 1905, he had a much more influential role in the events of that turbulent year than any other member of the first Party Politburo formed after the October Revolution. Dzhughashvili debated frequently with the Georgian Mensheviks. He talked at workers’ meetings. He was one of the most productive writers for Proletarians Brdzola. Always he urged Marxists to oppose outbreaks of inter-national violence. He vigorously promoted Bolshevik policies and called for the monarchy’s overthrow by an uprising which would bring a provisional revolutionary government to power. Marxists should unite workers and peasants in a political alliance. Compromise with the middle class on the Menshevik model was to be rejected.
Yet the prospects for Bolshevism in the south Caucasus had never been bleaker. Dzhughashvili wrote dispiritedly to Lenin in May:5
I’m overdue with my letter, comrade. There’s been neither the time nor the will to write. For the whole period it’s been necessary to travel around the Caucasus, speak in debates, encourage comrades, etc. Everywhere the Mensheviks have been on the offensive and we’ve needed to repulse them. We’ve hardly had any personnel (and now there are very few of them, two or three times fewer than the Mensheviks have), and so I’ve needed to do the work of three individuals . . . Our situation is as follows. Tiflis is almost completely in the hands of the Mensheviks. Half of Baku and Batumi is also with the Mensheviks . . . Guria is in the hands of the Conciliators, who have decided to go over to the Mensheviks.
Evidently he thought the comrade in Geneva ought to know the bitter truth about the factional balance among Marxists in the south Caucasus. Throughout the year Menshevism under Zhordania’s aegis thrust itself forward as the leading agency of Georgia’s rebellion against the Imperial monarchy. Bolshevism was in a small minority among the Georgian revolutionaries. Thus Dzhughashvili had chosen a factional allegiance which seemed to doom him to obscurity. The peasantry across Georgia followed the Mensheviks; and although he continued to argue that their strategy diverted attention from propaganda and organisation among the working class, he was a voice crying in the wilderness. He must have blamed Bolshevism’s weakness in Georgia to some extent on its failure – despite his advice in 1904 – to present the faction as a champion of national interests. He himself, however, was not infinitely flexible. He too wished to focus revolutionary activity on the towns, the workers and Marxist orthodoxy. Bolshevism did best in the south Caucasus where industry was well developed. This was the case in Baku. But Dzhughashvili did not despair: he had taken a deliberate decision that the basic strategy of the Bolsheviks was correct and that sooner or later it would triumph. For the rest of the year he predicted the imminence of the Romanov monarchy’s overthrow. Like all Bolsheviks, he declared that violent uprising and a revolutionary dictatorship were essential for this end.
Nicholas II started to panic in October 1905. Workers had formed their own councils (or ‘soviets’) which began by organising strikes and came to supplant the official bodies of self-government. Peasants moved against the landed gentry by illegal pasturing of livestock and stealing wood from forests. In Poland and Georgia the authorities were coming close to losing control. On advice from Count Witte, Nicholas II issued his ‘October Manifesto’ promising reform. In subsequent weeks it became clear that this would involve an elected parliament to be known as the State Duma as well as a Basic Law which would establish the framework that would define and constrain the powers of the Emperor, the government and the Duma. These concessions bought time and support for the monarchy; and although the Bolsheviks proceeded to organise an insurrection in Moscow, the armed forces steadily reasserted authority across the empire.
Stalin’s revolutionary impatience had not faded: he continued to argue for uncompromising adherence to the strategy of Bolshevism. Such was his growing success in Tbilisi that he was a natural choice as delegate to the factional conference held by the Bolsheviks in Tampere (Tammer-fors) in Finland in mid-December 1905. It was there he met Lenin at last. According to his later account, he was taken aback by the unprepossessing appearance of the leader of Bolshevism. Dzhughashvili had been expecting a tall, self-regarding person. Instead he saw a man no bigger than himself and without the hauteur of the prominent émigré figures.6 The Tampere Conference proved awkward for Lenin. Most Bolsheviks, including Dzhughashvili, rejected his preference for the faction to take part in the elections to the State Duma. They aimed at armed insurrection and the establishment of a ‘revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’, and they saw no point in wasting energy on elections called on Nicholas II’s terms. Lenin’s demand for tactical finesse left them cold. Having become Bolsheviks because they liked Leninist radicalism, they were disappointed that their leader was already compromising with the institutions of the Imperial order. Lenin himself backed down rather than lose his following at the Conference.7
Dzhughashvili was infused with the current factional mood. He was still developing as a politician. His difficulties with fellow Georgian Bolsheviks in 1904 showed that he was not lacking in strategic flexibility (and he continued to suggest compromises in policy in the years ahead). But in 1905 he lived and breathed ideas of armed insurrection and revolutionary dictatorship. He genuinely thought that the Imperial monarchy could be replaced. He therefore refused to countenance a policy of settling for a political order prescribed by Nicholas II. In fact a growing number of Bolsheviks came to recognise their mistake in not following Lenin’s advice. Lenin himself decided to put further pressure on his faction by agreeing to reunification with the Mensheviks at a Party Congress – he could not stand so many Bolsheviks purporting to be more ‘Leninist’ than himself. Such a move was also precipitated by the fact that the two factions, despite maintaining a separate existence in emigration, often co-operated in the Russian Empire.
The venue chosen for this Fourth Party Congress was Stockholm. Dzhughashvili was the only Bolshevik among sixteen delegates selected to represent Georgia. They made their way secretly via Moscow and St Petersburg to Helsinki. From there, disguised as teachers on an excursion, they took a steamer to the port of å bo. At that point they split into smaller groups.8 Dzhughashvili caught the steamship Wellamo and sailed to the Swedish capital. Arrangements had been made for him to stay at the Hotel Bristol with fellow Bolshevik Kliment Voroshilov. Bolshevik ‘conspiratorial’ schemes had been rumbled by the Stockholm police. Scores of alien-looking newcomers without obvious commercial or professional purposes were bound to attract attention. Dzhughashvili was apprehended and interrogated by Commissioner Mogren, a constable and an interpreter called Alexei. He gave his name as Ivan Ivanovich Vissarionovich and claimed he was a political refugee and a national democrat. He reassured the police that he was not being funded by Finns (which was a worry for the Swedish security agencies in those years). He also promised to report regularly to them during his stay. He indicated that he intended to go to Berlin before returning home. Dzhughashvili, like others, was released as a harmless visitor.9
He then enjoyed himself with the rest of the Bolshevik factional delegation. His modest expenses were covered by the party. This was the first period he spent outside the Russian Empire. The party had fraternal relations with the Swedish social-democrats and with their help had obtained the use of the People’s House for the Congress proceedings. Little attempt was made to prevent the Okhrana from knowing about the event – and anyway the Okhrana had plenty of informers and received detailed reports on proceedings at the apex of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party regardless of precautions taken by the revolutionaries. Each faction discussed its internal affairs. There were also negotiations among the factions. The atmosphere was convivial even though there was no time for delegates to see much of the city beyond their hotels and the People’s House. For Dzhughashvili, though, this did not matter. He had read articles by the luminaries of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party – Plekhanov, Axelrod, Lenin, Martov, Bogdanov and Maslov – over many years. (Alexander Bogdanov, a philosopher and organiser, had become almost as influential among Bolsheviks as Lenin himself.) Now Dzhughashvili saw them gathered together in a single large hall. The agreed task was to sort out the problems between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks as well as to settle a common set of policies, and Dzhughashvili was able to play his part.
While advocating reunification, Lenin did not disarm himself politically. He maintained a Bolshevik Centre separate from any party body involving the Mensheviks. He also continued to sanction armed robberies by Bolsheviks as a means of raising cash for political purposes. The Fourth Congress prohibited both these things. Lenin and his associates acceded in public while ignoring the ban in reality – and Dzhughashvili, as the main organiser of the Bolshevik campaign of robbery and extortion in Georgia, was an integral figure in this systematic deceit.
It was at the Fourth Congress that Dzhughashvili – using Ivanovich as his pseudonym – advanced his claim to be taken seriously by the ascendant party leaders. He was elected to the commission which checked the mandates of delegates. He also challenged the reliability of Georgian Menshevik reports on the situation in Georgia. This stirred controversy. His own speech, though, was questioned by Mensheviks and he was asked to justify himself. He shouted back: ‘I’ll give you my answer in my own time!’10 He declared: ‘It’s no secret to anyone that two paths have been marked out in the development of Russia’s sociopolitical life: the path of qua si-reforms and the path of revolution.’ For Dzhughashvili, the Mensheviks had foolishly adopted ideas diverting them from a Marxist strategy:11
On the contrary, if the class interests of the proletariat lead to its hegemony and if the proletariat must go not at the tail but at the head of the current revolution, it is self-evident that the proletariat cannot hold back either from active participation in the organisation of armed insurrection or from a seizure of power. Such is the ‘scheme’ of the Bolsheviks.
With a zealot’s confidence he freely attacked veterans of the Russian Marxist movement, including Plekhanov and Axelrod.12
He also participated robustly in the debate on the ‘agrarian question’, and his contributions were mentioned by other contributors.13 The Menshevik specialist Pëtr Maslov had proposed campaigning for the ‘municipalisation’ of the land as a means of appealing to the peasantry. Such a scheme would transfer arable soil to the property of district councils. Lenin by contrast had expanded his ideas by suggesting land nationalisation; he wanted the central government to own the land. Both Maslov and Lenin desired to expropriate the landed gentry without compensation and to put all fields cheaply at the disposal of the peasantry. They aimed to stipulate the terms of this tenure. But most Bolsheviks, following a certain S. A. Suvorov, regarded Lenin’s proposal as being as impractical as Maslov’s. Among them was Dzhughashvili. Stepping up to the platform, he made a case for simply letting the peasants take over the land without restrictions. This would enable the alliance of working class and peasantry to become a reality, and Marxists would succeed in competing with the Socialist-Revolutionaries for rural popular support.14 Suvorov and Dzhughashvili wanted the land to be declared ‘the common property of the entire people’. The internal Bolshevik dispute, however, did not get out of hand because the Mensheviks held a majority at the Congress and land municipalisation became official party policy.
Yet again Dzhughashvili had spoken confidently for Bolshevism without automatically consenting to everything advocated by Lenin. He acknowledged him as his faction’s leader. But his obedience was not blind: Dzhughashvili thought his direct daily experience of the Russian Empire kept him in closer touch with revolutionary possibilities than the émigrés.
There was anyway a reason outside politics for Dzhughashvili to feel cheery: he had found a woman he wanted to marry. He was in his late twenties and most of his friends were already in wedlock. The woman who caught his eye was Ketevan Svanidze. This was a sister of Alexander, a friend from the Spiritual Seminary. Alexander Svanidze, like Dzhughashvili, was a Bolshevik; Dzhughashvili would therefore be able to rely on her understanding of the demands of the life of a revolutionary. The courtship was a rapid one. Ketevan worked as a seamstress for the French dressmaker Mme Hervieu in Tbilisi’s Sololaki district. Wanted by the police, Dzhughashvili needed to be careful about his assignations with her; but luckily for him Ketevan’s employer was a kindly soul and let him meet his love in the back room of the shop. On one occasion, though, Mme Hervieu nearly regretted her indulgence when Lieutenant Pëtr Stroev strode into sight accompanied by two snarling German dogs bred for manhunts. She raced to warn him, and he escaped in the nick of time by the back entrance.15 Ketevan had a fine figure and was a sympathetic and kindly woman; and she was content with a life of hearth and home: she had no ambition to become active in the revolutionary movement. What she saw in him is not known. No one in the Svanidze family, which became prominent in Soviet public life in the 1930s, mentioned the subject. Perhaps she thought him very dashing after the derring-do in the couturier’s. At any rate he was physically slim and mentally intense and, as he showed in the years after her death, his appearance and personality had appeal for many women.
Ketevan and Joseph complied with religious propriety and on 16 July 1906 they took their marriage vows in a full Georgian Orthodox ceremony at the Zion Cathedral on the north bank of the Mtkvari. If the priest knew that several witnesses in the congregation were militant atheists (and failed seminarists), he kept quiet about it. After the wedding there was the conventional Georgian reception. Food and wine were plentiful, and the tamada (toastmaster) was the oldest Bolshevik in Georgia, Mikha Tskhakaya.16Dzhughashvili’s expectations were conventional: Ketevan’s function was to cook for him, clean and sweep their rooms and supply him with offspring – and it would seem that Ketevan was entirely content with the arrangement. This was in character for Dzhughashvili. It was never to his liking that relatives or friends might have an intellectual edge over him. A son was duly born to the couple on 18 March 1907. They named him Yakob.17
The role of husband did not tie him down and he remained busy writing and organising in Tbilisi. Among his written pieces was a lengthy series of articles on ‘Anarchism or Socialism’.18 Among the results of his organisational activity were the proceeds of crime, as Dzhughashvili, using Semën Ter-Petrosyan as Bolshevik robber-in-chief, presided over a series of armed thefts.19 At the beginning of 1907, still based in the Georgian capital, he helped to found the newspaper Mnatobi (‘The Torch’). Like Lenin, he welcomed German Marxist theoretician Karl Kautsky’s pamphlet on The Driving Forces and Prospects of the Russian Revolution, which inadvertently lent support to the Bolshevik case for a revolutionary alliance of workers and peasants; and Dzhughashvili wrote a preface for the Georgian edition. By then Dzhughashvili was Georgia’s leading Bolshevik. Doubts about his doctrinal orthodoxy were a thing of the past. Both in Georgia and Finland, where the Bolshevik Centre continued to function, his merits were acknowledged by fellow members of the faction. However, the political fortunes of Bolshevism in his homeland were dispiriting; and when he heard that the Fifth Party Congress was to be held in April 1907 in London, he knew the Menshevik participants would challenge his right to represent Tbilisi Marxist groups. He had worked intensively for little practical reward except a rise in esteem among Bolsheviks.
Expecting a wrangle over his mandate as a delegate, Dzhughashvili travelled to London on the papers of ‘Mr Ivanovich’. Since he was not yet a prominent party figure outside Georgia, the Congress organisers had no reason to lodge him near the leaders – Plekhanov, Axelrod, Lenin and Martov – in middle-class Bloomsbury. Instead he joined the mass of delegates in the East End. Jewish immigrant families from the Russian Empire lived there in their thousands at the turn of the century (and, like the Irish, were a substantial minority).20 This was the best spot for delegates to avoid attention from the Special Branch. They could also get cheap lodgings and it would not much matter if they could speak no English.
He never spoke of his London impressions. Perhaps his visit was too fleeting and busy for him to form much of an opinion. He had been allocated a room at 77 Jubilee Street in Stepney. The Congress was held at the Brotherhood Church three miles to the north on the corner of Southgate Road and Balmes Road.21 Thus the militant atheists in the Russian Empire debated the overthrow of the Romanovs in a place of Christian worship whose usual congregation consisted of pacifists and followers of the artist, writer and moderate socialist William Morris.22 Returning to his room each night, he occupied himself with writing and planning. His landlord was a Russian-speaking cobbler, probably Jewish, who had fled the Russian Empire. A witness of his brief stay has left us his account. This was a lad called Arthur Bacon, who earned halfpennies in the district for running errands and carrying out little tasks. He often came to the cobbler’s home to rake out the grate and fill it with coal and kindling, and Dzhughashvili used him to take messages to the various Bolshevik delegates staying in the vicinity. The cobbler’s wife addressed the envelopes since Dzhughashvili’s English did not stretch to writing out names.
Although young Bacon voted Conservative on growing up, he remembered Mr Ivanovich with affection. Dzhughashvili liked the toffees the boy brought with him. The boy had financial reason for gratitude: instead of the usual halfpenny, he received a two-bob piece for conveying a message to a comrade.23 Since this was 4,700 per cent above the going rate, Dzhughashvili’s financial acumen was not all it might have been.
Whereas he had made his mark at the Stockholm Congress by harrying the Menshevik leaders and distancing himself from Lenin’s agrarian policy, he did little to distinguish himself in London. As expected, a dispute broke out over his mandate. In the end he was allowed to attend the Congress without a vote.24 There were further procedural disputes. Three days were spent in arguing about the agenda. The situation was complicated by the inclusion of various organisations from the ‘national’ borderlands – the Poles, the Latvians, the Armenians and the Bundist Jews – in the proceedings. Consequently neither the Bolsheviks nor the Mensheviks held a firm majority and there was much discussion behind the scenes to secure agreement. Lenin offered Zhordania and the Georgian Mensheviks a deal whereby they could run party business in Georgia without interference in return for their not taking sides against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party as a whole. Zhordania refused.25 If Dzhughashvili had heard of the proposal, he would scarcely have been pleased. Lenin’s collusion with Zhordania would have ruined everything Dzhughashvili had fought for in the south Caucasus since becoming a Bolshevik. It would also have taught him that the region was not hugely important to Bolshevism’s leadership. A clash between Lenin and Dzhughashvili would have been inevitable.
The Bolsheviks at the Congress anyway came under fire for maintaining their separate Centre, for carrying out armed robberies and for failing to share party funds with the Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks, though, were equally aggressive. Although they now thought it desirable to participate in Duma elections, they rejected the idea of co-operating with liberals in the chamber; they accused Mensheviks of selling out the revolutionary cause. The proceedings were intensely controversial. A Central Committee of fifteen members was formed. Five were Bolsheviks and there were four Mensheviks. The balance of power was held by the ‘national’ organisations in the party. A joint central newspaper, Sotsial-demokrat, was to be revived. But this fooled no one. The Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party was a house divided against itself.