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

Koba wrote to the Bolsheviks in exile abroad to complain of the bacchanalia of arrests and hinted to Lenin that Malinovsky was putting a wrench in the works and was a police spy. In February Iakov Sverdlov (who would be first head of the Soviet state), then Koba, were arrested. This time it was decided not just to make Koba finish his exile but to pack him off for four years to farthest Siberia, to Turukhansk on the river Enisei where it crosses the Arctic Circle.

Despondent despite money offered by the party, Koba made no escape attempt, although he now signed himself K. (for Koba) Stalin (man of steel). ²⁶ From Turukhansk, Koba was sent still farther north to the tiny settlement of Miroedikha. Here Koba’s behavior made him hated. The exile who had preceded him, Iosif Dubrovinsky, had drowned in the river Enisei that May. Stalin violated revolutionary etiquette by appropriating Dubrovinsky’s library. He was transferred ninety miles south to the village of Kostino, and then north again to a hamlet, Monastyrskoe. Koba was, one guesses, more miserable than ever before or afterward. From here he wrote to Zinoviev asking for books. He asked a woman friend to send his underwear. He wrote to, of all people, Roman Malinovsky, asking for sixty rubles, complaining of poverty—no bread, meat, or paraffin in an area where the only food an exile could have for free was fish—of emaciation and an ominous cough. Then, on September 27, 1913, he moved in with Iakov Sverdlov ten miles away. Money arrived, but it was meant only for Sverdlov’s escape. The gendarmerie, who read all letters, deducted the money from Stalin’s and Sverdlov’s board allowances and deported them, with a gendarme, Laletin, a hundred miles farther north to an even more desolate outpost, Kureika. Again Stalin begged Malinovsky for money, as if he did not know that Malinovsky had resigned after being exposed as a spy.

Sverdlov found Stalin bad company. He wrote to his wife: “ . . . you know my dear what foul conditions I lived in at Kureika. The comrade [Stalin] we were with turned out on a personal level to be such that we didn’t speak or see each other.” By Easter 1914, Stalin had forced Sverdlov out and moved in with a family of seven orphans, the Pereprygins. He scandalized both Sverdlov and Ivan Laletin by seducing the thirteen-year-old Lidia Pereprygina. Bolsheviks had tolerant sexual mores, but sleeping with a pubescent girl was for them typical of the hated feudal gentry. Koba was now beyond the pale. Laletin caught Stalin in flagrante and had to fight off Koba’s fists with his saber. (Stalin then promised to marry Lidia Pereprygina when she came of age.) At Stalin’s insistence, the Turukhansk chief of police, the Osetian Ivan Kibirov, replaced the indignant Laletin—who nearly drowned on his return upriver—with a more compliant gendarme. ²⁷ Lidia became pregnant; in 1916, after the baby died, she conceived again.²⁸

Cohabitation with an adolescent girl gave Stalin no joy. He read, he tried to master languages. He wrote very little—to Zinoviev to ask for English newspapers, to the Alliluevs to ask for postcards with pictures of pleasant scenery. He made one visit 120 miles upstream to Monastyrskoe, where his Armenian friend Suren Spandaryan, now dying of TB, had been transferred. When the ice melted in spring 1915, five Bolshevik Duma deputies, all “anti-patriotic defeatists,” arrived, exiled to Monastyrskoe, and with them one familiar face from Tbilisi, Lev Kamenev. Here the exiles conferred, but Stalin could never endure more than a day or two of these gatherings, even though the news of Russia’s catastrophic defeats by the Germans must have rekindled hopes of revolution. Dispossessed radicals, cut off from their ideological leaders by war and 7,000 miles of Asia and Europe, seemed to Koba “a little bit like wet chickens. Ha, there’s ‘eagles’ for you.”²⁹

The company soon dispersed: the Duma deputies and Kamenev were allowed south to the town of Eniseisk. The remaining exiles were demoralized and began to accuse each other of crimes: Sverdlov had been teaching a policeman German; Spandaryan had helped loot the local stores. Stalin voted that Sverdlov be ostracized. Another exile was beaten up; after the brawl Spandaryan had a hemorrhage which led to his death in September, despite the Tsar freeing him on compassionate grounds. Nobody saw Stalin in his last months in Siberia; perhaps he fled to Eniseisk, from hostility toward him at Kureika when Lidia Pereprygina became pregnant again.