Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

In spring 1903 Stalin roused prisoners to protest against a visit by the exarch of the Georgian Church. He was moved a hundred miles east, to Kutaisi, where he was described by the social democrat Grigol Urutadze: “a beard, long hair combed back. An insinuating gait, in little steps. He never laughed with an open mouth. . . . He was absolutely imperturbable.” The gendarmerie proposed exiling him to eastern Siberia for six years.

It took the bureaucracy until the winter of 1903–04 to send Jughashvili, with two dozen other social democrats, in summer clothing, across the Black Sea and the Urals to Siberia, to a village forty miles from the railway. After two months Jughashvili persuaded a peasant (who was flogged for complicity) to drive him to the railhead from where he escaped back to the Caucasus. He was sheltered in Tbilisi by a fellow student of Suren Spandaryan, an engineer’s son who would become a key figure in Lenin’s entourage, Lev Kamenev (Rosenfeld). For some days, before he himself fled north to St. Petersburg, Kamenev protected Jughashvili, a comradely gesture which he must have bitterly regretted twenty years later. Few people suffered such scorpionlike ingratitude as Kamenev had from Stalin.

Not for the last time Stalin was suspected of being a police collaborator, a provocateur. So fast a return from Siberia unsettled Jughashvili’s associates. How had he gotten the hundred rubles for the fare from Siberia? Jughashvili said that he had forged a certificate that he was a police agent. But where had he found forms and stamps in the Siberian swamps? He went to Baku but was ostracized. He flitted to Tbilisi and back again. On May Day 1904 he was beaten up. He hid with a maternal uncle in Gori for two months. Only in August was he rehabilitated by the party, which was too short of educated activists to persist with its suspicions.

Using the name Koba, Stalin climbed ranks thinned by arrests and soon came to dominate the Caucasian Social Democrats. After the split between moderate Mensheviks and intransigent Bolsheviks at the second Social Democrat Party congress in 1903, the Bolsheviks felt free to act violently. In Geneva, Lenin, his spouse Krupskaia, Rozalia Zemliachka, and other extremists called for a new congress to endorse revolutionary action. At last Stalin had a policy he could impose on his Caucasian colleagues with enthusiasm. With Lado Ketskhoveli dead, nobody had more charisma and authority than Koba among the Georgian Bolsheviks. Intermittently, he received moral and financial support from the Russian Bolsheviks: Kamenev returned to Tbilisi in September 1904; Lenin’s emissary Tsetsilia Zelikson came from Switzerland; Kamo Ter-Petrosiants escaped from Batumi prison and joined him. That year Stalin was always on the move across Transcaucasia. His contacts among the railway workers served him well: he was hidden in train cars for his journeys.

From 1900 discontent swept the urban workers of the Russian empire. Whenever the Tsar’s government gave an inch, the workers (as the reactionaries rightly warned) tried to take a yard. In 1900 a tram workers’ depot was all that Stalin could shut down; in 1904, when the country was not only rapidly industrializing but also preparing for war with Japan, Koba’s Armenian and Azeri colleagues led a strike that paralyzed the oil fields of Baku and, for the first time in Russian history, forced employers to yield to workers. The gendarmes and Okhranka (security service) arrested so many Bolsheviks that Tbilisi’s more law-abiding Mensheviks temporarily took over the Social Democrat Party.

Russia’s defeat by Japan, and the promised reforms wrung from the Tsar after unarmed workers were gunned down in St. Peterburg’s notorious “Bloody Sunday” of January 1905, gave revolutionaries a sense of power. In summer 1905 they roused the Baku workers to burn down half the oil wells of the city. Koba traveled thousands of miles, attending meetings, delegating work to new and old recruits. When nothing was demanded of him Koba was quarrelsome and surly, buried in books for months on end, and yet, in crises, he organized the feckless, persuaded the irresolute, and conciliated the fractious, barely sleeping at all and rarely in the same place for more than a few days. Comrades overlooked his repellent personal manner, given his organizational genius.

At the age of twenty-five Stalin made the first of his few close attachments. He was hidden by his friend Mikhail Monaselidze, who had married into the Svanidze family. The three Svanidze sisters were dress-makers to the wives of army and gendarmerie officers; they lived close to the barracks and their house was the last place the police would search. Here Koba felt safe and here he courted Monaselidze’s sister-in-law Kato. Koba’s relationship with Kato Svanidze was as near as he came to commitment to another person.