Stalin: A Biography

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.¹⁶ Dzhughashvili’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