Stalin: A Biography

Stalin and Sverdlov stayed with the Alliluev family in St Petersburg.¹⁷ Quickly they restored links with party organisations in the empire and with the ‘foreign’ part of the Central Committee in Kraków. All this time they had to keep at least one step in front of the Okhrana. The electoral campaign for the Fourth State Duma was in full cry and Stalin stayed in the capital to help and direct Bolshevik activities. He also began writing again for Pravda. On 19 October he contributed the leading article on ‘The Will of the Voters’ Delegates’; and Lenin printed his piece ‘The Mandate of the St Petersburg Workers’ in the émigré newspaper Sotsial-demokrat. On election day, 25 October, the Bolsheviks did well by securing six seats. The need for co-ordination was paramount and Stalin made a last-minute trip to Bolsheviks in Moscow to confer with Roman Malinovski and other newly elected individuals. With the ending of the electoral campaign it was equally urgent to strengthen contact with Kraków. Stalin, after briefly returning to St Petersburg and assuring himself that arrangements for the Duma were in place, bought train tickets for Poland in early November. He was going to consult Lenin. For the first time they would meet as fellow members of the Central Committee.

The trip was memorable for Stalin. As the train approached the border with Austrian Poland, he found himself in a carriage with a passenger reading aloud from a Russian nationalist newspaper. He could not stop himself from shouting across at him: ‘Why are you reading that rubbish? You should read other newspapers!’¹⁸ Alighting from the train, he had to get help in crossing the border to Kraków. He wandered around the market till he bumped into a friendly cobbler. Stalin used his charm: ‘My father was also a cobbler, back in my homeland, Georgia.’ The cobbler, refusing any recompense, took Stalin to his home, fed him and at dusk escorted him by a winding route across the hills into Austrian Poland.¹⁹

He arrived in time for a meeting between the Central Committee members and three Bolshevik Duma deputies. Stalin did not enjoy the experience. In November there had been a Bolshevik plan to organise a one-day political strike and demonstration outside the Tauride Palace in St Petersburg. When the Mensheviks opposed this as being dangerous and unproductive, the Bolshevik faction had backed down. Lenin heard about this in Kraków and drafted an angry article.²⁰ His ill temper had not spent itself before the three Duma deputies arrived in Poland. Stalin agreed that the Bolshevik faction had made a mistake, but he doubted that the best way to bring them into line was to browbeat them:²¹

Ilich recommends ‘a hard policy’ for the group of six [Bolshevik Duma deputies] inside the faction, a policy of threatening the majority of the faction, a policy of appealing to the rank and file against the faction’s majority; but Ilich will give way since it is self-evident that the [Bolshevik] six are not yet well enough developed for such a hard policy, that they are not prepared and that it’s necessary to start by strengthening the six and then use them to thrash the majority of the faction as Ilya [Muromets] used a Tatar to thrash the Tatars.

Stalin believed that the Bolsheviks could win over the Mensheviks in the Duma faction. He had attended a faction meeting and could testify that this was feasible. Persuasion really could work. Stalin thought Lenin inept and ill informed to insist on tactical intransigence.²²

On much friendlier terms with Stalin was Lev Kamenev, an acquaintance from their Tbilisi days as well as a Central Committee member. Feeling lonely in Kraków, Stalin wrote him what can only be called a billet-doux:²³ ‘I give you an Eskimo kiss on the nose. The Devil take me! I miss you — I swear to it like a dog. There’s no one, absolutely no one, to have a heart-to-heart conversation with, damn you. Can’t you somehow or other make it over here to Kraków?’ Still strengthening his position in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party leadership, he was reaching out to potential friends who could help him.