Vladimir Lenin, resident in the Austrian province of Galicia, followed parliamentary performances in Vienna through the Cracow papers. The way Habsburg survived the ethnic imbroglio impressed him. In an article he sent to the St. Petersburg Pravda he declared that "Austria handles the national problem far better than the Tsar."
As a matter of fact, Lenin admitted that he himself, as the leader of a revolutionary movement composed of different Slavic as well as non-Slavic elements, had things to learn about handling the ethnic problem. "As to nationalism," he wrote Maxim Gorki in February 1913, "I am fully in agreement that it is necessary to pay more serious attention to it. We have here a wonderful Georgian who is writing a long article for Prosveshchenye, for which he has gathered all the Austrian and other material."
The "wonderful Georgian"-Stalin-had been entrusted with a task in Vienna that was vital to the Party. To Stalin himself it was a breakthrough opportunity. True, by 1913 he had already become something of a Bolshevist journalist through his contributions to the legally published Pravda in St. Petersburg. But his initial and still primary reputation among comrades was quite different. He had made his mark as a rough-and-ready activist, a fomenter of strikes, an organizer of bank robberies on behalf of the party's treasury-in brief, a red buccaneer who did not shrink from gun or bomb. His challenge in Vienna involved much subtler aspects of the cause. Socialism was international and supra-national by its very motto: "Workers of All Countries, Unite!" Yet in 1913 Europe's workers were subject to divisive nationalisms. Even the proletariat longed for national identity. How could that need be fulfilled without setting the oppressed of one land against the oppressed of another? This was the question worrying Lenin. During his Austrian mission, Stalin was to answer it by way of an essay in Prosveshchenye, the Party's sociological journal.
The Wonderful Georgian had to address a complex issue in a foreign city under unfamiliar circumstances. Especially unfamiliar were Stalin's hosts in Vienna. They didn't resemble the underground comrades he had known in Georgia or the tough pamphleteers of St. Petersburg or the better educated but blunt and hard-eyed pragmatists around Lenin in Cracow. The Troyanovskys who took in Stalin at Schonbrunner Schlossstrasse 20 were elegants. Alexander Troyanovsky, a son of a high Tsarist officer, graduate of Voronezh Cadet School, destined to be Soviet Ambassador to Washington, spoke an aristocratic Russian and played a brilliant game of bridge when partnered with his wife Elena, who was a lawyer born of a noble family. "They have money," Lenin said in a letter describing the couple. Of course they also had impeccable party credentials including some years in Siberia, a region not known for its bridge tournaments. At any rate, the Troyanovskys were the most comme it faut comrades in Vienna. Quite possibly Lenin sent the Wonderful Georgian to them as to a finishing school. They were to polish this diamond in the rough.
It proved unpolishable. The Troyanovskys failed to civilize their guest. He ignored Vienna's cafes, its suavities, frivolities, balls-even those given by trade unions. With a surly, even pace he kept tramping through the city's gayest month in pursuit of nothing but his mission.
"I was in conversation over tea with a comrade," Trotsky would recall of a very cold day in Vienna, "when suddenly, without knocking at the door, there entered from another room a man of middle height, haggard, with a swarthy grayish face showing marks of smallpox. The stranger, as if surprised by my presence, stopped a moment at the door and gave a guttural grunt which might have been taken for a greeting. Then, with an empty glass in his hand, he went to the samovar, filled his glass with tea, and went out without saying a word."
Not that Stalin meant to be rude to Trotsky specifically. The two men had clashed in print before; within ten years they would begin the world-famous duel destined to split Communism on all continents. But on that January afternoon of 1913, when they first came face to face in Vienna, each did not know who the other one was. Stalin took in that dainty comrade with the French novel under his arm and proceeded to behave-like Stalin.
Frills or manners were not for him. Nor did he bother with pleasantries when talking about his own work. "Greetings, friend," he said early in February 1913 in a letter to a fellow Bolshevik in St. Petersburg, "I am still sitting in Vienna and writing all sorts of rubbish."
"Rubbish" turned out to be a strategic milestone. In Vienna, Stalin was researching and composing a treatise calculated to enrich his party image. His Marxism and the National Question examined (for its relevance to Russia) the position of prominent Austrian Socialist thinkers like Karl Renner and Otto Bauer. They favored cultural autonomy for minorities under a federalist charter. But Stalin marshalled evidence to conclude that a Socialist commonwealth must go further-far enough to grant nationalities the right to secession.
This argument had to please Lenin because it suited an imperative he'd often discussed with his disciples: the need to entice more non-Slavic Socialists within the Tsarist empire into the Bolshevist camp, that is, into Lenin's wing of the Party. Stalin's essay thus further increased the wonderfulness of the Georgian (non-Slavic himself) in the eyes of the master.
And the Vienna essay did more. It established Stalin as a theoretician eligible to participate in ideological leadership. Four years later it helped catapult him to the top echelon of the Soviet revolutionary government as Commissar of Nationalities. (In fact, Stalin's Vienna experience had still further, rather ironic, consequences. When he seized supreme power after Lenin's death, he resorted to the "Austrian" solution after all. In other words, he dealt with the nationalities problem by giving them only cultural-not political-independence.)
All in all, Stalin had a great deal of fine-tuning work to do during the Vienna carnival of 1913. He managed impressively, considering his lack of German. Though some comrades helped him with interviews and library sleuthing, he mastered most difficulties himself. At the same time he expedited other chores in the teeth of a pleasure-mad season of a city strange to him. He set up a better coordination system between various international Bolshevist centers, using Vienna as the hub. He devised a mail-forwarding mechanism from Cracow to Vienna and from Vienna to Paris. He located a cheap, serviceable print shop for putting out Party pamphlets and circulars.
And that done, with the first draft of his essay locked into his wooden suitcase, still impervious to the city's charm and the Troyanovskys' chic, he tramped in his boots to Vienna's Northwest Railroad Terminal on February 16th. In a third-class carriage he rolled away from the Vienna carnival, a grim virtuoso wearing the mask of a clod.
On the morning of February 11, 1913, Franz Schuhmeier arrived in Vienna at the same station by which Stalin would leave it five days later. Schuhmeier was returning from a brief overnight trip to the suburbs, but before he could walk out into the streets he must submit to a ritual unknown in any other modem capital. At the Northwest Terminal, as at every principal entrance point, Vienna exacted a consumer's tax on goods purchased outside the city-a levy going back to the Middle Ages.
Schuhmeier let a green-capped customs official search his briefcase. He was waved on. A moment later a slight figure in a torn raincoat stepped behind him. "My revenge!" said the little man, drew a Browning from his pocket, and fired a bullet through the back of Schuhmeier's skull.