Stalin: A Biography

Dzhughashvili’s friend Lado Ketskhoveli agreed with Zhordania’s critics and was keen to counteract the trend by practical action. Ketskhoveli argued for the establishment of a clandestine newspaper. Although Kvali had its uses, it could not propagate a full revolutionary message for fear of the Imperial censorship.¹⁸ Ketskhoveli and Dzhughashvili generally advocated tighter forms of ‘underground’ organisation than Zhordania approved. Whereas Zhordania hoped to broaden the opportunity for ordinary workers to join the Marxists and contribute actively to party life, his younger critics thought it risky to let authority slip from the hands of experienced organisers such as themselves. This dispute affected the whole Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party at the turn of the century. The beginnings of the split which occurred in 1903 between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were already detectable. Agreement existed that the techniques of clandestine party activity had to be respected. Beyond this point there were the symptoms of a split which became a gaping wound in Georgian Marxism in the years ahead.

Lado Ketskhoveli shrugged off Zhordania’s control by setting up an illegal Marxist newspaper, Brdzola (‘Struggle’), in Baku on the Caspian coast. Zhordania had obstructed any such venture in Georgia for fear of jeopardising the publication of Kvali. For Ketskhoveli, Zhordania’s reaction was a further indication that the Tbilisi Marxist leadership was making too many compromises. Baku’s population included Russians, Armenians and Georgians as well as an Azeri majority. He quickly found a press in Baku¹⁹ and by forging documents purporting to come from the governor of Yelizavetgrad he was able to get the owners to go ahead with the printing.²⁰ Cunning and strong-minded, he set up the kind of Georgian-language newspaper he wanted. Copies were sent to Marxist groups throughout the Caucasus. Later in life Dzhughashvili pretended that he had co-founded Brdzola. In reality it was exclusively Ketskhoveli’s work. Dzhughashvili also overstated the degree of antagonism between the two of them and Zhordania. Tensions certainly existed and were increasing; but co-operation persisted, and Ketskhoveli eventually turned to Zhordania to write the editorial for one of Brdzola’s issues.²¹

Meanwhile Dzhughashvili was making a nuisance of himself in the Georgian capital. The Tiflis Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party was riddled with political and personal disputes. (Georgia’s Marxists, never aspiring to secession from the Russian Empire, referred to their capital by the Russian name Tiflis.) But Dzhughashvili made everything worse. One memoir, without directly naming him, identifies a ‘young, muddled comrade from the intelligentsia, “energetic” in all matters’. According to this account, the individual, ‘invoking conspiratorial considerations as well as the unpreparedness and lack of [political] consciousness among workers, came out against admitting workers to the committee’.²² The Marxists of Tbilisi took this to be an unpleasant opinion unpleasantly delivered — and the context makes it virtually certain that Dzhughashvili was the comrade in question. Another contemporary, Grigol Uratadze, wrote more directly that Dzhughashvili was arraigned before his comrades and found guilty as a ‘slanderer’.²³

In November 1901, after being withdrawn from propaganda work in Tbilisi by the City Committee, Dzhughashvili left for Batumi on the Black Sea coast seeking to spread his ideas in a more receptive milieu. But many Marxists in Batumi did not take to him. Dzhughashvili kept ranting about the sins of commission and omission of the Tiflis Committee. This was bad enough. But the comrades in Batumi could not stand his ‘personal capriciousness and his tendency to despotic behaviour’.²⁴ What is notable here is that objections were made less to policy than to attitude and comportment. Nastiness to acquaintances had been his hallmark since he had been a youngster. Ambition too had been a characteristic. But he wanted to rise to revolutionary eminence on his own terms; and whenever others baulked him, he told them they were wrong and stupid. He was a clever young man who thought he had the answers to the difficulties experienced by Marxist propagandists in the south Caucasus. Stressing the need for clandestine activity, illegal propaganda and control over the workers, Dzhughashvili was a Bolshevik in waiting.