Stalin: A Biography

They pulled off their greatest coup on Erevan Square almost within sight of the Spiritual Seminary in Tbilisi on 12 June 1907. Kamo arrived in the disguise of an Imperial general in a comfortable horse-drawn carriage. They knew that a large quantity of banknotes was about to be delivered by stagecoach. Bombs were thrown at the guards. Kamo and his accomplices picked up linen bags with a quarter of a million rubles inside, and Kamo himself drove his coach away at full speed, taking advantage of the chaotic, bloody scene. He brought the proceeds of the robbery to the Bolshevik Centre base in Kuokkala in Finland. Lenin was delighted.

Dzhughashvili had taken a brief trip to Berlin shortly beforehand²⁵ — probably this involved some consultation with the Bolshevik leadership abroad. Afterwards Lenin, Dzhughashvili and Kamo wished to keep everything about the robbery strictly secret. Dzhughashvili and Kamo felt especially vulnerable since several Marxists in Tbilisi knew who had been organising the robberies. The Mensheviks, still outweighing the Bolsheviks in Georgia, set about their enquiries in November 1907. Silva Dzhibladze was put in charge of the commission set up to try the suspected participants. Dzhibladze himself had a less than saintly past; he had been expelled from the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary for a physical assault on the Rector.²⁶ But he drew the line at breaking party policy. Dzhughashvili was identified beyond all reasonable doubt as the éminence grise behind the Erevan Square affair.²⁷ By then, though, Dzhughashvili was nowhere to be found. Worried about being sought by the police or being asked to account for himself to the Mensheviks, he had fled into hiding in Baku.²⁸ Mensheviks were to claim that he was expelled from the party.²⁹ What is clear is that the Bolsheviks, having made so much money from the robberies, ceased this criminal activity and that Dzhughashvili became ever more prominent in the politics of Bolshevism in the south Caucasus. He and Kamo remained friends and saw each other often during and after 1917. They justifiably felt they had carried out Lenin’s instructions with great diligence.

Dzhughashvili made it his task to harry Menshevism in the south Caucasus. This factional strife mattered as much to him as the organising of revolutionary activity among the Baku workers and the oversight of the expropriations. His zeal and intelligence had brought him to the forefront of Bolshevism in the region. In Georgia he was ‘famous as the second Lenin’.³⁰ He regularly derided the pride taken by Mensheviks in their successes with the Georgian peasantry in 1905–6. Thus he declared that class struggle was better organised in Baku on the Caspian coast with its great concentration of working-class inhabitants. While Zhordania and the Mensheviks directed their energy at activity among Georgians in Georgia, Dzhughashvili moved among Russians, Armenians and Azeris as well as people of his own nationality. He had genuine chutzpah, even claiming that the Mensheviks in Tbilisi were reluctant to take on the Bolsheviks in debate. This was unfair: Zhordania was always willing to accept any such challenge. But Dzhughashvili was not trying to be fair. He wanted to discredit Menshevism and would use any material that lay to hand. Generally he accused Zhordania of an obsession with legal activity which was tantamount to a policy of closing down the clandestine party network.³¹

Zhordania retorted that the Mensheviks had overlooked neither Baku nor the working class but were actually stronger than the Bolsheviks there.³² The truth lay somewhere between Zhordania and Dzhughashvili. The Mensheviks regarded Georgia as their citadel. Yet they also worked in other places, including Baku, and at times were more effective than the Bolsheviks. But the differences in strategy held the factions apart. Whereas Bolsheviks operated almost exclusively among the workers, the Mensheviks took other classes such as the peasantry very seriously. The Mensheviks were much more willing than the Bolsheviks to use the State Duma as an instrument of political organisation and propaganda. The Bolsheviks, despite the failure of revolution in 1905–6, kept alive the dream of organising an armed uprising against the Imperial monarchy.

Dzhughashvili was a frontline attacker of Menshevism in one of the regions most important for the revolutionary cause in the Russian Empire. His intransigence was just what Lenin wanted in a follower. Dzhughashvili himself had acquired a broader perspective on politics since attending great party gatherings in Tampere, Stockholm and London, and his preference for working in Baku rather than in Tbilisi was a significant one. He no longer saw himself as primarily a Georgian Marxist; his role had become one of a Marxist who could work anywhere in the south Caucasus or in the empire as a whole. When reporting on the Fifth Party Congress, he commented:³³