“Do you suppose,” FDR mused several times, “it made some kind of difference in Stalin? Doesn’t that explain part of the sympathetic quality in his nature that we all feel?” Perhaps it was the “priesthood” that had taught Stalin “the way a Christian gentleman should behave.”
This most un-Christian of gentlemen had moved far from Christianity. Even moderate, noble socialists like Jordania now irritated him and Lado. “They’re conducting cultural and educational activities among workers without training them to be revolutionaries,” Soso complained. He denounced Jordania to his friends, explaining that he had discovered the works of a brilliant new radical named “Tulin,” one of the aliases of Vladimir Ulyanov, who would become Lenin.
“If there’d been no Lenin,” said Stalin in old age, “I’d have stayed a choirboy and seminarian.” Now he told his friends about this far-off radical. “I must meet him at all costs!” he declared, about to commit himself absolutely to life as a Marxist revolutionary. But he had more immediate problems. Keke “got so angry with him” for leaving the seminary that Soso had to hide a few days in the Gambareuli Gardens, outside Gori, where his friends brought him food. He returned to Tiflis but he soon argued with his roommates, who were supporters of Jordania. He moved out. He had fought with his seminarist friends, then with his roommates, and now he would confront the older radicals of Tiflis. Wherever this rude and arrogant boy went, there was trouble.{74}
8. The Weatherman: Parties and Princes
Soso needed a job and a home. He became a weatherman. Unlikely as it sounds, the life of a meteorologist at the Tiflis Meteorological Observatory was a most convenient cover for a young revolutionary. His friend from Gori, Vano Ketskhoveli, younger brother of Lado, was already working there when in October 1899 Stalin arrived to share his small room beneath the observatory’s tower.[37] As a “probationer-observer,” he was on duty only three times a week from 6:30 a.m. until 10 p.m., checking temperatures and barometers hourly, in return for twenty roubles a month. On night duty, he worked from 8:30 p.m. to 8: 30 a.m., but then he had the whole day off for revolutionary work. In late 1899, Lado, eagerly assisted by Soso, started to organize a strike, one of the first full-scale radical mobilizations of workers in Georgia.
On New Year’s Day, Lado managed to paralyse the city when the drivers of its Belgian-owned trams stopped work. The secret police were observing Lado and his revolutionary weathermen. In the first weeks of 1900, the police turned up at the observatory, arrested Stalin and carted him off to the Metekhi Fortress. The arrest, Stalin’s first of many, was officially because Beso had not paid his local taxes in his native village, Didi-Lilo{75}—though probably this was a cryptic warning from the Gendarmes.
Stalin had no money, but his better-off friends (led by Davitashvili) banded together and settled the bill. This can hardly have added to Soso’s paternal affections, yet Beso did visit him at the observatory several times.
When Keke heard that Beso had once again descended on her son, the redoubtable mother headed into Tiflis on a rescue mission. She insisted on staying in Soso’s room.{76}
Once Stalin was released—and the interfering Keke had gone home—he returned to encouraging the workers to strike across the city: the railway workshops were the hub of this agitation. He spent much time around the railway depot, “a long stone building with large latticed windows, the deafening roar of clanks and knocks, the puffing and huffing of locomotives.” Initially, his comrades assigned him two clandestine groups of railway workers—so-called circles—to supervise. “I was a complete greenhorn, a total beginner.”{77}
Stalin lived and dressed the part, wearing what Trotsky called the “generally recognized sign of a revolutionary, especially in the provinces”: a beard; long, almost hippyish hair; and a black satin Russian blouse with a red tie. And he revelled in his scruffiness. “You never saw him in anything,” says Iremashvili, “but that dirty blouse and unpolished shoes.”{78}
Soso energetically lectured and agitated at his circles. “Why are we poor?” he asked these small gatherings in workers’ digs. “Why are we disenfranchised? How can our life be changed?” His answer was Marxism and the Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party (the SDs).{79}
The workers listened reverently to this young preacher—and it was no coincidence that many revolutionaries were seminarists and the workers, often pious ex-peasants. Some later nicknamed Soso “the Priest.” “It’s a holy struggle,” explained the Tiflis agitator Mikhail Kalinin. Trotsky, agitating in another city, remembered that many of the workers thought the movement resembled “the early Christians” and had to be taught that they should be atheists.
“If the word ‘committee’ has a tedious twang nowadays, then the very words ‘committee’ and ‘party’… charmed young ears like a seductive melody,” wrote Trotsky. “These were the days of those aged 18–30. Anyone who joined knew prison and exile awaited him—it was a matter of honour to hold out as long as possible.”
Soso, who also believed in the sanctity of the cause, soon achieved his first success.{80}
On 1 May 1900, Soso organized a secretive and seminal mass meeting with his characteristically meticulous security. May Day—the Maievka—was the Christmas Day of socialism. The secret police tried to arrest Lado, who scarpered to Baku, the oil city on the Caspian Sea. Stalin stepped into his shoes.
The evening before, instructions and passwords were distributed. At night,500 workers and activists headed into the hills outside Tiflis to be met by lantern-waving picket-leaders who confided new passwords and routes. At the meeting, they sang “The Marseillaise.” Stalin and the other speakers then clambered onto some rocks: there Soso gave his first big speech, vigorously encouraging strike action while Jordania and the Mesame Dasi opposed it.
Soso and his radicals won. The railroad depots struck, as did Adelkhanov’s Shoe Factory, where Beso still worked.
“Why are you coming here?” he asked Soso, resenting his son’s visit.
“To address these fellows,” replied Soso.
“Why aren’t you learning a trade?” It was their last recorded contact: Beso failed to cling to his job and became one of the flotsam and jetsam of vagrant desperadoes, borne away on a tide of alcoholism, poverty and despair.
For the first time, the secret police mentioned Soso Djugashvili—along with the much older Victor Kurnatovsky, who knew Lenin himself, and Silva Jibladze, the legendary rector-beater—as a leader in their reports. Stalin had made his mark.{81}
The secret police were circling, but life in Tiflis was still sleepy, charming, idyllic with its balmy nights and busy street cafés. The revolutionaries enjoyed an almost undergraduate existence. “Their evenings were filled with loud arguments, reading and prolonged conversations interspersed with guitar playing and singing,” recalls Anna Alliluyeva, daughter of Sergei, the skilled electrician and Marxist agitator who operated alongside Stalin at the Tiflis railway depot. Tiflis was an intimate town where news travelled fast from one vine-entwined verandah to another on “the balcony telegraph.”
37
The observatory still stands, though it is as rundown as every institution in Georgia. Stalin’s room remains, with a few of his supposed possessions and the old plaque: THE GREAT STALIN—LEADER OF VKPB AND WORLD PROLETARIAT—LIVED AND WORKED HERE, THE TIFLIS METEOROLOGICAL OBSERVATORY, FROM 28 DECEMBER 1899 TO 21 MARCH 1901, LEADING ILLEGAL SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC WORKERS’ CIRCLES.