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

There were even more sophisticated motives: at the Ministry of the Interior, the head of police Sergei Zubatov was infiltrating the Social Democrat and Social Revolutionary movements. Merely to bribe or blackmail revolutionaries into being police informers was futile; an effective informer such as Roman Malinovsky—soon to be a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee and the leader of the Social Democrat faction in the Duma—would be either found out or paralyzed every time his information was acted on. More Mephistophelean were plans to encourage, even subsidize, extreme and fractious revolutionaries to splinter the left into feuding factions.

If Koba collaborated with the Okhranka, this is a tribute to his equally Mephistophelean recognition of the common interests that bound the Tsar’s Ministry of the Interior with the Social Democrat movement. Certain murders—of the Georgian Christian liberal writer and politician Prince (now Saint) Ilia Chavchavadze in 1907, of Russian Prime Minister Piotr Stolypin in 1911—were the joint work of the establishment’s right wing and the revolution’s left wing, united against the parliamentary liberals who thwarted them both. Arrests and exiles of Social Democrats still took place, but only if the revolutionaries were no use to the police as informers or allies.

Koba stayed in Vologda until February 1912, cementing his relationship with Viacheslav Molotov in St. Petersburg by an exchange of letters. He closeted himself studying German verbs. He missed the Prague party conference, but wrote a letter which showed, as Krupskaia expostulated, that, “He is terribly cut off from everything as if he has come from another planet.” In February 1912 Koba left for Moscow, his every move reported to the police by agents, among them Roman Malinovsky whom Koba treated as a bosom friend. In Petersburg Koba learned that the Prague conference had co-opted him onto the Central Committee and made him, with Elena Stasova, Orjonikidze, and Malinovsky, a member of the Russian Bureau that would implement within the country decisions taken abroad.

In April 1912 Koba was instrumental in setting up the Bolsheviks’ legal newspaper, Pravda, in St. Petersburg. In May, Molotov took over as editor, so that even in Stalin’s absence the paper would remain Stalinist.

The authorities, informed about the Prague congress, rounded up all the Central Committee members on Russian territory, with the exception of their own spy Malinovsky and, for show, Grigori Petrovsky.²³ The Bolshevik fraction suddenly became a party in exile. This time the security services worked professionally: Koba was properly described and a dossier of over 1,000 pages (the charge sheet amounted to sixty pages) was compiled. ²⁴ The sentence was not, however, harsh. Koba was exiled to Narym, a village of a few hundred persons on the river Ob in Siberia, north of the railhead in Tomsk. Ernest Ozolinņ, a Latvian socialist, accompanied Stalin and other political prisoners on the very uncomfortable train journey. To Ozolinņš, Stalin stood out with his mocking, ironical sense of superiority, his aggressiveness, and self-confidence.²⁵ In September 1912, after a few months’ languishing, Koba took a boat and, near Tomsk, found a friendly railwayman to smuggle him onto a passenger train back to Europe.

The authorities took two months to put him on the wanted list. By then, Koba was organizing the Bolshevik campaign for the fourth Duma elections. Koba made his way to the Caucasus, probably to help Kamo Ter-Petrosiants stage a mail robbery. By October he was back in Petersburg, where he helped ensure the Okhranka’s coup: their spy Roman Malinovsky was elected to the Duma to represent both Bolsheviks and the secret police. Soon Malinovsky had reported Koba’s arrival and both were on their way to Kraków to see Lenin. Here Koba met one more key associate: Grigori Zinoviev, a dairy farmer’s son who had spent most of the last decade in Switzerland, studying and lecturing in socialist politics.

No sooner had Malinovsky and Koba recrossed the Austrian-Russian frontier to get to St. Petersburg for the opening of the Duma than Lenin, Zinoviev, and Krupskaia, sensing a trap, urgently called Koba back: “Rush him out as soon as possible, otherwise we can’t save him and he’s needed and has already done the essentials.” Stalin nevertheless returned to Russia and there was no reason to panic. Malinovsky, now Bolshevik spokesman in the Duma, had taken such a soft line that many of his colleagues began to believe he was a police agent.