Dzhughashvili did not approve of Zhordania’s strategy. He agreed that the peasants should be promised the transfer of all agricultural lands and that Lenin’s proposal was too timid. But he disliked the idea of diverting so much propaganda and organisation to the peasants. He insisted on the need to operate among the ‘workers’. He also made a point of the need for Marxists to report on and explain the vicissitudes of the labour movement outside the Russian Empire, especially in central and western Europe.32
About a further point of dissent with Zhordania, however, he was always to show extraordinary reticence. Dzhughashvili was still far from abandoning all his Georgian patriotism. He wished a distinct Marxist party to be formed in Georgia. Whereas Zhordania aimed for a regional organisation covering the entire Caucasus regardless of its ancient national and ethnic boundaries, Dzhughashvili demanded a Georgian territorial demarcation in the party.33 The difference between Zhordania and Dzhughashvili was large; it was even larger between Dzhughashvili and those other comrades such as Mikha Tskhakaya who were to become Bolsheviks. Tskhakaya agreed that the books, pamphlets and newspapers had to be written in the Georgian language — otherwise no Georgian workers would get acquainted with Marxism — but like other radical Marxists, he felt that Zhordania’s preoccupation with Georgia’s national and cultural development gave off a whiff of nationalism. Dzhughashvili’s idea for a territorially demarcated organisation in the south Caucasus seemed equally malodorous to radicals who espoused Marxism because it offered a path to modernity and away from nationalist strife.
Such an idea in fact had echoes more widely in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. The Jewish Bund — the Marxist organisation based in the western borderlands of the Russian Empire and dedicated exclusively to work among Jews — was criticized by the Iskra group for demanding territorial autonomy inside the party despite the fact that other ethnic groups lived in the same region. (Marxists in the south Caucasus avoided such requests on behalf of a single national or ethnic group.) This request was discussed at the Second Party Congress in August 1903. When Iskra’s representatives opposed any such nationalterritorial principle for organisation, the Bundists walked out. Wilful and independently minded, Dzhughashvili was risking being classified as a Marxist who could not accept the Russian Social-Democratic Party’s commitment to internationalism.
Dzhughashvili, though, was undeterred. He had begun to make a mark for himself. Having moved involuntarily from Tbilisi, he did not gain a reputation as a congenial comrade; but this did not prevent him from imposing himself. In Batumi he found a set of workers ripe for being influenced by his summons to revolutionary activity; and he helped to organise the strikes and demonstrations against the monarchy. From Batumi he kept in touch with Baku, and Dzhughashvili was developing his skills in Marxist propaganda. Detention in Batumi Prison cut short his literary career, but he went on discussing his controversial strategic inclinations and giving papers on them.34 He was held there for a year before being transferred to Kutaisi. Transferred back to Batumi, he was finally — in autumn 1903 — dispatched to the southern part of mid-Siberia. The destination was Novaya Uda in Irkutsk Province, where he arrived on 27 November. He escaped in early 1904 and made for Tbilisi. (This required two attempts. On the first occasion he foolishly failed to kit himself out with warm clothing for the Siberian winter and he was recaptured with badly frozen ears and face.)35 The second attempt succeeded. From Tbilisi he travelled the length and breadth of the south Caucasus.
Grigol Uratadze, fellow prisoner in Kutaisi Prison, left a helpful memoir of Dzhughashvili in these years. He wrote long after Dzhughashvili had become Stalin and dictator of the USSR; and the two men were long-standing political opponents. Nevertheless the memoir has some credibility since Uratadze made no pretence that Dzhughashvili already seemed a potential dictator. Uratadze started by saying: ‘As an individual Stalin had no special distinguishing features.’ But then he contradicted himself:36
He was a very dry person; one might even say that he was desiccated. For example, when we were let outside for exercise and all of us in our particular groups made for this or that corner of the prison yard, Stalin stayed by himself and walked backwards and forwards with his short paces, and if anyone tried speaking to him, he would open his mouth into that cold smile of his and perhaps say a few words. And this unsociability attracted general attention.
This was extraordinary behaviour for a prisoner with only a limited opportunity to talk to others. He had arrived in Kutaisi Prison as the sole ‘intellectual’ in the group of prisoners transferred from Batumi.37 Yet he neither helped to keep up their morale nor sought out contact with intellectuals from his own party.38
Kutaisi Prison was nostalgically remembered as a ‘university’ for its inmates.39 Marxist prisoners read books and discussed ideas. Dzhughashvili, however, kept to himself. His strangeness impressed Uratadze:40
He was scruffy and his pockmarked face made him not particularly neat in appearance… In prison he wore a beard and had long hair brushed back. He had a creeping way of walking, taking short steps. He never opened his mouth to laugh but only at most to smile. And the size of the smile depended on the volume of emotion evoked in him by a specific event; but his smile never turned into a full-mouthed laugh. He was completely imperturbable. We lived together in Kutaisi Prison for more than half a year and not once did I see him get agitated, lose control, get angry, shout, swear or — in short — reveal himself in any other aspect than complete calmness. And his voice exactly corresponded to the ‘glacial character’ which those who knew him well attributed to him.
If this were to be the only such testimony about him, it would be easily dismissed. But it fits with everything said about his personality before and after his period of confinement.
Escaping at last from Novaya Uda, he returned to his Bolshevik comrades in a mood to impose his vision.41 In his absence there had been fundamental changes in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party and Lenin, for a while, emerged the victor. At the Second Party Congress, which was held in Brussels and London from July to August 1903, Lenin’s Iskra group had trounced the other trends. But at the moment of their triumph the Iskraists fell apart. Lenin’s supporters advocated a particularly exigent set of conditions for party membership. His erstwhile associate Yuli Martov, who had helped him to drive out the Bund, found himself in a minority. Martov agreed on the need for clandestinity, centralism, discipline and ideological unity. But, like Zhordania in Georgia, he frowned on policies designed to restrict the number of party members. It was Martov’s belief that Lenin had gone over to an authoritarian and counter-productive organisational campaign. They and their supporters voted against each other. Lenin won and called his followers the Majoritarians (bol’sheviki or Bolsheviks), and Martov in a fit of self-abnegation allowed his men and women to be known as the Minoritarians (men’sheviki or Mensheviks).