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

Under interrogation, Koba disavowed all his activities; he claimed again his rights to the 1905 amnesty; he even denied that he was living with Stefaniia Petrovskaia, who had admitted that she was his common-law wife. The gendarmerie at Kutaisi, Tbilisi, and Baku took so long to make sense of the evidence that he was aiming to overthrow the state that he was spared lifelong exile to Siberia. (Corruption may have helped; at least one Baku gendarme, Major Zaitsev, was in the pay of the local revolutionaries.) Koba also obtained phlegm from a prisoner with advanced tuberculosis, bribed the prison doctor to certify him as seriously ill, and asked to be allowed to marry Stefaniia. Koba’s sentence was again lenient: he was banned from the Caucasus for five years and handed back to the Vologda authorities as “a person harmful to public peace.” Consent for Koba and Stefaniia to marry came through too late, on the day he was dispatched northward. In Solvychegodsk Koba knew no one; ironically his most faithful henchman in the future, Viacheslav Molotov, had just left the town for Vologda, the provincial capital where they met a few months later.

Having proved himself capable of robbing, killing, resisting interrogation, and withstanding prison and exile, Koba was now important enough to the party in Europe to be worth rescuing: he was in 1910 picked out for the Central Committee, in case any members should risk working in Russia. Koba began writing to Lenin, pointing out that the workers, even if they preferred Lenin’s line to the law-abiding approach of Leon Trotsky, had no respect for a party which cowered in Paris cafés and Zurich libraries: “Let them climb up the wall as much as they feel like, but we think that those who value the movement’s interest just get on with it.”²¹

Koba was visited by the gendarmerie twice a day. Consolation in Solvychegodsk came from his landlady, Maria Kuzakova, who in late 1911 gave birth to a son, perhaps Koba’s, Konstantin. On July 6, 1911, Koba was allowed to move to live under police supervision in Vologda, where there was a public library, a theater, a left-wing newspaper, and easy communications with the rest of Russia and with Bolsheviks abroad. In Vologda Koba met another exile, Piotr Chizhikov, who, while in exile further north in Totma had become engaged to a schoolgirl, Pelageiia (Polina) Georgievna Onufrieva. She followed him to Vologda and, with Chizhikov out all day, whiled away the hours with Koba.

Koba often mentioned his dead wife to Polina: “You can’t imagine what beautiful dresses she used to make!”²² Koba inscribed books “to clever, nasty Polina from Oddball Iosif” and wrote affectionate postcards: “I kiss you in turn, but I don’t kiss in an ordinary way, but arrrrrdently (it’s not worth just plain kissing). Iosif.” Stalin showed characteristic pedantry: he told her how important was William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (as one might expect from someone who was a Caliban impersonating Prospero). He described to Polina the paintings of the Louvre. After they parted she gave him the cross she wore, and Iosif, instead of a photograph of himself, sent her pictures of bare-breasted nymphs and half-undressed kissing couples. On his secret trip to Petersburg in August he used a passport in the name of her fiancé who, although an exile, was not a wanted man.

The Okhranka now took a closer look at Koba: they decided at first not to rearrest him, but to use him as a tracer to lead them to other Bolsheviks. They let Koba reach St. Petersburg, where Orjonikidze gave him a message from Lenin. In October 1911 he left again; this time, he hoped, for good. He was followed closely, arrested, and so well interrogated that he gave, for almost the only time, his real date of birth. Even so, the Okhranka failed to translate the Georgian and German entries in Koba’s notebooks, and gave him a railway pass to Vologda and permission to live anywhere except St. Petersburg and Moscow. The gendarmerie had so vague a description of Koba—omitting his pockmarks and crippled arm—that he could not be recaptured easily.

In Baku or Tbilisi such leniency indicated corruption. Administrative sanctions against revolutionaries were determined at the highest level—by the minister of the interior, even the Tsar—but on the basis of reports compiled by lowly captains or majors. The gendarmes and prison wardens in the provinces had their tariff, from fifty rubles for letting someone impersonate a prisoner, to 800 rubles for sending the prisoner to a tolerable part of European Russia, not Siberia. In Petersburg, however, such laxity occurred for serious reasons: either the Okhranka had made its prisoner a police informer or the Okhranka wanted other revolutionaries to suspect that its prisoner was an informer.