Young Stalin Read online

  ALSO BY SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE

  Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

  Potemkin: Catherine the Great’s Imperial Partner

  To my darling son,

  Sasha

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Stalin Family Tree

  Maps

  Introduction

  List of Characters

  Note

  Prologue: The Bank Robbery

  PART ONE

  1. Keke’s Miracle: Soso

  2. Crazy Beso

  3. Brawlers, Wrestlers and Choirboys

  4. A Hanging in Gori

  5. The Poet and the Priesthood

  6. The “Young Man with the Burning Eyes”

  7. Battle of the Dormitories: Soso versus Father “Black Spot”

  8. The Weatherman: Parties and Princes

  9. Stalin Goes Underground: Konspiratsia

  10. “I’m Working for the Rothschilds!”—Fire, Massacre and Arrest in Batumi

  PART TWO

  11. The Prisoner

  12. The Frozen Georgian: Siberian Exile

  13. Bolshevik Temptress

  14. 1905: King of the Mountain

  15. 1905: Fighters, Urchins and Dressmakers

  16. 1905: The Mountain Eagle—Stalin Meets Lenin

  17. The Man in Grey: Marriage, Mayhem (and Sweden)

  18. Pirate and Father

  19. Stalin in London

  20. Kamo Goes Insane: The Game of Bandits and Cossacks

  21. The Tragedy of Kato: Stalin’s Stony Heart

  22. Boss of the Black City: Plutocrats, Protection-Rackets and Piracy

  23. Louse Racing, Murder and Madness—Prison Games

  24. “River Cock” and the Noblewoman

  25. “The Milkman”: Was Stalin a Tsarist Agent?

  PART THREE

  26. Two Lost Fiancées and a Pregnant Peasant

  27. The Central Committee and “Glamourpuss” the Schoolgirl

  28. “Don’t Forget That Name and Be Very Wary!”

  29. The Escapist: Kamo’s Leap and the Last Bank Robbery

  30. Travels with the Mysterious Valentina

  31. Vienna, 1913: The Wonderful Georgian, the Austrian Artist and the Old Emperor

  32. The Secret Policeman’s Ball: Betrayal in Drag

  PART FOUR

  33. “Darling, I’m in Desperate Straits”

  34. 1914: Arctic Sex Comedy

  35. The Hunter

  36. The Robinson Crusoe of Siberia

  37. Stalin’s Reindeer-Propelled Sleigh and a Siberian Son

  PART FIVE

  38. 1917 Spring: Floundering Leader

  39. 1917 Summer: Sailors on the Streets

  40. 1917 Autumn: Soso and Nadya

  41. 1917 Winter: The Countdown

  42. Glorious October 1917: The Bungled Uprising

  43. Power: Stalin Out of the Shadows

  Epilogue: An Old Tyrant—in Remembrance of Things Past

  Stalin’s Names, Nicknames, Bylines and Aliases

  Acknowledgements

  Source Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Illustrations

  1878–1904

  Mugshot of Stalin, 19121

  School photo, late 1880s2

  Stalin’s birthplace in Gori1

  Official photo of Beso, Stalin’s father3

  Stalin’s mother, Keke1

  Koba Egnatashvili18

  Sasha Egnatashvili18

  Damian Davrichewy4

  Stalin in 1893, aged sixteen5

  Stalin in 18961

  Seminary photo, late 1890s1

  Fire at an oil refinery6

  Rothschild oil refinery, Batumi6

  Hashimi Smirba6

  Group photo in Kutaisi Prison, 19036

  Novaya Uda6

  Kutaisi Prison6

  Stalin’s cell6

  Natasha Kirtava6

  Olga Alliluyeva3

  Olga and her children3

  1905–1910

  Kamo3

  Stalin’s network of street children, 19057

  Okhrana agents pose in their street costumes3

  Stalin, ca. 1905–65

  Trotsky5

  Lenin, ca. 19055

  Kato Svanidze1

  Kato Svanidze, headshot, from gravestone, Tbilisi3

  Daily Mirror extract, 16 May 19078

  Russian Social Democratic Labour Party agreement3

  Daily Mirror extract, 27 June 19078

  Daily Mirror extract, 15 May 19078

  Mugshot of Kamo from the police files, ca. 19081

  Sergo Ordzhonikidze1

  Baku oil fountain5

  Nagayev’s Palace in Baku9

  Burning oil wells, Baku, 14 September 190310

  Murtuza Mukhtarov and his wife, Liza11

  Stalin with Kato’s family beside her dead body, 19071

  Alvasi Talakvadze6

  Ludmilla Stal11

  Stalin1

  Stalin when he was arrested in 19101

  1910–1917

  Stalin with Spandarian in 19151

  Backs of postcards12

  Front of postcard1

  Maria Kuzakova with her son Constantine and his baby3

  Mugshot of Stalin when he was arrested in 19111

  Stalin’s apartment block in Vienna13

  Lenin’s flat in Cracow1

  Roman Malinovsky3

  Stalin in 19131

  Tatiana Slavatinskaya16

  Kureika, photographed in the 1930s1

  Ostyak tribesman with reindeer on the Arctic Circle14

  Alexander Davidov17

  Lidia Pereprygina17

  Bolshevik exiles photographed at Monastyrskoe in the summer of 19151

  Vera Shveitzer14

  KGB boss Serov’s memo to Khrushchev in 1956, about the investigation into Stalin’s affair with thirteen-year-old Lidia Pereprygina12

  Taurida Palace3

  Soldiers in St. Petersburg, February—March 19173

  1917–1918

  Lenin addresses the crowds from Kseshinskaya’s palace in St. Petersburg, July 19173

  July Days coup3

  Nadya Alliluyeva1

  Stalin’s bedroom in the Alliluyev apartment3

  Lenin1

  Smolny and new Soviet government, 19173

  The first meeting of the new government15

  Lenin’s orders to his guards on access to his office15

  Stalin5

  Alexandra Kollontai and Pavel Dybenko ca. 19175

  Stalin, ca. 19175

  The author and publishers offer their thanks to the following for their kind permission to reproduce images:

  1. David King Collection

  2. Stalin House Museum, Gori

  3. Author’s collection

  4. Davrichewy Family Collection

  5. RIA Novosti

  6. Khariton Akhvlediani State Museum, Batumi

  7. Georgian Filial Institute of Marxism-Leninism (GF IML)

  8. Mirrorpix

  9. Getty

  10. Roger Viollet / Topfoto

  11. Azerbaijan International Magazine

  12. RGASPI

  13. Lisa Train

  14. Dr. Piers Vitebsky

  15. Smolny Institute Museum

  16. Achinsk Regional Museum (ARM)

  17. The Sunday Times (London)

  18. Egnatashvili Family Collection

  While every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be happy to acknowledge them in future editions.

  Introduction

  “All young people are the same,” said Stalin, “so why write . . . about the young Stalin?” Yet he was wrong: he
was always different. His youth was dramatic, adventurous and exceptional. When in old age he reflected on the mysteries of his early years, he seemed to change his mind. “There are,” he mused, “no secrets that won’t be revealed for everyone later.” For me as a historian unveiling his clandestine life up to his emergence as one of Lenin’s top henchmen in the new Soviet government, he was right about the secrets: many of them can now be revealed.

  There are few works on early Stalin (compared to many on young Hitler), but this is because there seemed to be so little material. In fact, this is not so. A wealth of vivid new material that brings to life his childhood and his career as revolutionary, gangster, poet, trainee priest, husband and prolific lover, abandoning women and illegitimate children in his wake, lay hidden in the newly opened archives, especially those of often-neglected Georgia.

  Stalin’s early life may have been shadowy but it was every bit as extraordinary as, and even more turbulent than, those of Lenin and Trotsky—and it equipped him (and damaged him) for the triumphs, tragedies and predations of supreme power.

  Stalin’s pre-revolutionary achievements and crimes were much greater than we knew. For the first time, we can document his role in the bank robberies, protection-rackets, extortion, arson, piracy, murder—the political gangsterism—that impressed Lenin and trained Stalin in the very skills that would prove invaluable in the political jungle of the Soviet Union. But we can also show that he was much more than a gangster godfather: he was also a political organizer, enforcer and master at infiltrating the Tsarist security services. In contrast to Zinoviev, Kamenev or Bukharin, whose reputations as great politicians are ironically founded on their destruction in the Terror, he was not afraid to take physical risks. But he also impressed Lenin as an independent and thoughtful politician, and as a vigorous editor and journalist, who was never afraid to confront and contradict the older man. Stalin’s success was at least partly due to his unusual combination of education (thanks to the seminary) and street violence; he was that rare combination: both “intellectual” and killer. No wonder in 1917 Lenin turned to Stalin as the ideal lieutenant for his violent, beleaguered Revolution.

  This book is the result of almost ten years of research on Stalin in twenty-three cities and nine countries, mainly in the newly opened archives of Moscow, Tbilisi and Batumi, but also in St. Petersburg, Baku, Vologda, Siberia, Berlin, Stockholm, London, Paris, Tampere, Helsinki, Cracow, Vienna and Stanford, California.

  Young Stalin is written to be read on its own. This is a study of Stalin’s life before power, up to his arrival in government in October 1917, whereas my last book, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, covers Stalin in power up to his death in March 1953. Both are intimate histories of the man and politician but also of his milieu. I hope they will together form an introduction to the most elusive and fascinating of twentieth-century titans, showing the development and early maturity of the ultimate politician. What missing empathy in Stalin’s upbringing allowed him to kill so easily, but equally what quality equipped him so well for political life? Were the cobbler’s son of 1878, the idealistic seminarist of 1898, the brigand of 1907 and the forgotten Siberian hunter of 1914 destined to become the fanatical Marxist mass-murderer of the 1930s or the conqueror of Berlin in 1945?

  My two books are not meant to form an exhaustive narrative history covering every political, ideological, economic, military, international and personal aspect of Stalin’s life. That has already been superbly done, in different eras, by two scholars—Robert Conquest, the founding maestro of Stalinist history, with his Stalin: Breaker of Nations and, more recently, Robert Service, with his Stalin: A Biography—and I do not think I could improve on their broader works.

  I make no apology that my two books are tightly focused on the intimate and secret, political and personal lives of Stalin and the small circle that ultimately came to create and rule the Soviet Union until the 1960s. Ideology must be our foundation as it was for the Bolsheviks, but the new archives show that the personalities and patronage of a minuscule oligarchy were the essence of politics under Lenin and Stalin, as they were under the Romanov emperors—and just as they are today under the “managed democracy” of twenty-first-century Russia.

  Stalin’s prolonged youth has always been a mystery, in many senses. Before 1917, he cultivated the mystique of obscurity but also specialized in the “black work” of underground revolution, which was, by its nature, secretive, violent and indispensible—but disreputable.

  Once in power, Stalin’s campaign to succeed Lenin required a legitimate heroic career which he did not possess because of his experience in what he called “the dirty business” of politics: this could not be told, either because it was too gangsterish for a great, paternalistic statesman or because it was too Georgian for a Russian leader. His solution was a clumsy but all-embracing cult of personality that invented, distorted and concealed the truth. Ironically this self-promotion was so grotesque that it fanned sparks, sometimes innocent ones, which flared up into colossal anti-Stalin conspiracy-theories. It was easy for his political opponents, and later for us historians, to believe that it was all invented and that he had done nothing much at all—particularly since few historians had researched in the Caucasus where so much of his early career took place. An anti-cult, as erroneous as the cult itself, grew up around these conspiracy-theories.

  The most intriguing rumour remains: was Stalin a double-agent for the Tsar’s secret police? The dictator’s most infamous secret policemen, Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrenti Beria, secretly sought such evidence to use against Stalin in case he turned against them—as indeed he did. It is significant that neither of them, with the absolute researching power of the NKVD behind them, ever found that “smoking gun.”

  Yet there is a deeper mystery too: every historian has quoted Trotsky’s claim that Stalin was a provincial “mediocrity” and Sukhanov’s that he was just a “grey blur” in 1917. Most historians followed Trotsky’s line that Stalin was so greyly mediocre that he failed to perform in 1905 and 1917, becoming, in Robert Slusser’s words, “The Man Who Missed the Revolution.”

  Yet, if this was so, how did the “mediocrity” seize power, outwit talented politicians such as Lenin, Bukharin and Trotsky himself, and coordinate his programme of industrialization, the savage war on the peasantry and the ghoulish Great Terror? How did the “blur” become the homicidal but super-effective world statesman who helped create and industrialize the USSR, outplayed Churchill and Roosevelt, organized Stalingrad, and defeated Hitler? It is as if the pre-1917 mediocrity and the twentieth-century colossus cannot be the same man. So how did one become the other?

  They are in fact absolutely the same man. It is clear from hostile and friendly witnesses alike that Stalin was always exceptional, even from childhood. We have relied on Trotsky’s unrecognizably prejudiced portrait for too long. The truth was different. Trotsky’s view tells us more about his own vanity, snobbery and lack of political skills than about the early Stalin. So the first aim of this work is to reveal the true record of Stalin’s rise, as unblemished as possible by either the Stalinist cult or the anti-Stalin conspiracy-theory industry.

  There is a tradition of biographies dealing with the early careers of great statesmen. Winston Churchill wrote of his own youth and there have been many works on his early career. The same goes for many other historical titans, such as both presidential Roosevelts. Young Hitler has become an industry, though no work comes close to the outstanding first volume of Ian Kershaw’s Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris.

  On Stalin, in a field of thousands of books, there have been just two serious Western works on his pre-1917 years: the excellent political-psychological Stalin as Revolutionary by Robert Tucker (1974), written long before the new archives were opened; and a Cold War work of anti-Stalin conspiracy-theory by Edward Ellis Smith (1967), who argues that Stalin was a Tsarist agent. There have been more in Russia, mainly journalistic sensationalism. However, the outstanding work is Alexander Ostrovsk
y’s magisterial, indefatigable Kto stoyal za spinoi Stalina? (Who Was Behind Stalin?) (2002). My own work is indebted to all three.

  So much of the inexplicable about the Soviet experience—the hatred of the peasantry for example, the secrecy and paranoia, the murderous witch hunt of the Great Terror, the placing of the Party above family and life itself, the suspicion of the USSR’s own espionage that led to the success of Hitler’s 1941 surprise attack—was the result of the underground life, the konspiratsia of the Okhrana and the revolutionaries, and also the Caucasian values and style of Stalin. And not just of Stalin.

  By 1917, Stalin knew many of the characters who would form the Soviet elite and his court in the years of supreme power. The violence and clannishness of the Caucasians, men like Stalin, Ordzhonikidze and Shaumian, played a special role in the formation of the USSR at least as great as the contributions of the Latvians, Poles, Jews and perhaps even Russians. They were the essence of the “Committeemen,” who formed the heart of the Bolshevik Party and were likely to support Stalin against intellectuals, Jews, émigrés and particularly the brilliant, haughty Trotsky. Such types took to the brutality of the Civil War (and to the liquidation of the peasantry, and to the Terror) because, like Stalin, indeed alongside him, they had been raised in the same streets, had shared gang warfare, clan rivalries, and ethnic slaughter, and had embraced the same culture of violence. My approach avoids much of the psycho-history that has both obscured and oversimplified our understanding of Stalin and Hitler. As I hope this book shows, Stalin was formed by much more than a miserable childhood, just as the USSR was formed by much more than Marxist ideology.

  Yet the formation of Stalin’s character is particularly important because the nature of his rule was so personal. Furthermore, Lenin and Stalin created the idiosyncratic Soviet system in the image of their ruthless little circle of conspirators before the Revolution. Indeed much of the tragedy of Leninism-Stalinism is comprehensible only if one realizes that the Bolsheviks continued to behave in the same clandestine style whether they formed the government of the world’s greatest empire in the Kremlin or an obscure little cabal in the backroom of a Tiflis tavern.

  It seems that Russia today—dominated by, and accustomed to, autocracy and empire, and lacking strong civic institutions especially after the shattering of its society by the Bolshevik Terror—is destined to be ruled by self-promoting cliques for some time yet. On a wider plane the murky world of terrorism is more relevant than ever today: terrorist organizations, whether Bolshevik at the beginning of the twentieth century or Jihadi at the start of the twenty-first, have much in common.