Stalin was just beginning, but already he divided his comrades into heroes, followers and enemies. First he found a new mentor, Prince Alexander “Sasha” Tsulukidze, a “tall handsome young man” dressed beautifully in Western suits, a friend of his other hero, Lado. Both hailed from classes above that of Stalin: Lado was a priest’s son but the Red Prince’s father was one of Georgia’s richest aristocrats; the family of his mother, Princess Olympiada Shervashidze, had ruled Abkhazia.[38] Stalin praised the “astonishing, outstanding talents” of Lado and Prince Sasha, both of them beyond his jealousy because they were long dead. Stalin had only one real hero: himself. In a lifetime of defiant, self-reliant egotism, Lado, Prince Sasha and Lenin were the only others who came close. He was, he said, their “disciple.”{82}
Stalin already had his own little court among the radical boys expelled from the seminary: another forty were sent down in 1901, including the icon-urinator (Stalin’s ex-pupil) Elisabedashvili and his friend Alexander “Alyosha” Svanidze, who rented a flat in Sololaki Street, just above Yerevan Square. There Stalin gave lessons, preparing a reading list of 300 books for his circle. “He didn’t just read books,” said Elisabedashvili, “he ate them.” Debonair with noble connections and three pretty sisters, Alyosha Svanidze would become Stalin’s brother-in-law and intimate until the Terror. But Stalin did not meet the sisters for a while.
The other pupil, just arrived from Gori, was the semi-psychotic Simon Ter-Petrossian, aged nineteen, soon to be known as “Kamo,” who had also spent his childhood joining in streetfights, “stealing fruit and my favourite activity—boxing!” He hung around Svanidze’s flat “in order to learn something,” but he wanted to be an army officer. His tyrannical father ranted at him for spending time with Stalin, “that penniless good-for-nothing.” But “when my father went bankrupt in 1901,” says Ter-Petrossian, he lost his power over the boy. “Stalin was my tutor. He taught me literature and gave me books… I really liked Zola’s Germinal!” Stalin “drew him like a magnet.”
Stalin was not the most patient teacher, however. When Ter-Petrossian struggled with Russian and Marxism, Stalin ordered another of his acolytes, Vardoyan, to teach him. “Soso lay reading a book while I taught Kamo Russian grammar,” remembers Vardoyan, “but Kamo had limited mental abilities and kept saying kamo instead of komu [to whom].” Stalin “lost his temper and jumped up but then laughed, ‘Komu not kamo! Try and remember it, bicho [boy]!’ Afterwards, Soso, always an avid coiner of nicknames for his courtiers, nicknamed Ter-Petrossian ‘Kamo,’ which stuck for his whole life,” says Vardoyan. If Kamo struggled with the language, he was intoxicated with Marxism, and “enthralled” by Stalin. “For now, just read more!” Stalin instructed him. “You might just manage to become an officer, but it would be better if you gave it up, and engaged in something else…” Stalin, like Dr. Frankenstein, groomed Kamo to become his enforcer and cutthroat.
“Soso was a philosophical conspirator from the start. We learned conspiracy from him,” says Vardoyan. “I was addicted to his way of talking and laughing, his mannerisms. I found myself imitating him against my will so my friends called me ‘Soso’s gramophone.’”{83}
Yet Soso was never the carefree Georgian. Even then, “He was a very unusual and mysterious man,” explains David Sagirashvili, a young socialist who met him at this time and noticed him “walking the streets of Tiflis, thin, pockmarked and carelessly dressed, burdened with a big stack of books.”
Stalin attended a wild party given by Alyosha Svanidze. They were drinking cocktails of melon juice and brandy, and got wildly drunk. Yet Soso lay on a sofa on the verandah reading silently, making notes. So they started to look for him: “Where is he?”
“Soso’s reading,” replied Alyosha Svanidze.
“What are you reading?” his friends asked mockingly.
“Napoleon Bonaparte’s Memoirs,” Soso replied. “It’s amazing what mistakes he made. I’m making a note of them!” The intoxicated gentry had hysterics at this autodidactic cobbler’s son whom they now nicknamed the “Kunkula” (Staggerer), for his hasty and awkward gait.{84} But the serious revolutionaries, such as Stalin, Lado and Prince Sasha, were not wasting their time on cocktails.
Georgia was in a revolutionary “ferment of ideas.” These passionate young idealists “returned late at night with friends,” recounts Anna Alliluyeva. “They sit down at the table, someone opens a book, starts to read aloud.” They were all reading one thing—Lenin’s new newspaper Iskra (Spark), which propagated the vision of a party led by a tiny militant elite.
This new model of a revolutionary electrified young hotheads like Stalin, who no longer aspired to be the gentleman-amateur enthusing broad groups of workers but resolved to be the brutal professional, leader of a ruthless sect. Always happiest in vigorous campaigns against internal as well as external foes, Soso, still only aged twenty-two, was determined to break Jordania and Jibladze, and bend the Tiflis Party to his own will. “He spoke with cruelty,” reports Razhden Arsenidze, a moderate Marxist who admitted that Stalin “radiated energy, his words imbued with a raw power and singlemindedness. Frequently sarcastic, his cruel witticisms were often as extreme as the lash of a whip.” When his “outraged” listeners protested, he “apologized, explaining that it was the language of the proletariat,” who “talked bluntly but always told the truth.”
The secret police and the workers regarded this ex-seminarist as an “intellectual,” but to the bewildered moderates he was “a muddled young comrade” launching a “hostile and disruptive agitation against the leaderships of the SD organization in Tiflis.” They openly mocked Soso as “ignorant and obnoxious,” according to Davrichewy. Jibladze grumbled that “we gave him circles to agitate against the state and instead he agitated against us.”{85}
Stalin, his mentors and followers still met “on the banks of the Kura sitting under scented acacias drinking cheap wine, served by the kioskkeeper.” But the success of Stalin’s strikes had concentrated police minds. The secret police decided to crush the movement before it could organize its 1901 May Day riot. The Gendarmes, analysing their intelligence on the revolutionary “leader” Stalin, immediately spotted his talent for conspiracy: “an intellectual who leads a group of railway workers. External observation revealed he behaves very cautiously, always keeps looking behind him when walking.” He was always hard to catch.{86}
Overnight on 21–22 March 1901, the secret police, the Okhrana, swooped down on the leaders, Kurnatovsky and Makharadze.[39] They surrounded the weather observatory to catch Stalin, who was returning on the tram. He suddenly noticed through the tram window the studied nonchalance of plainclothes secret policemen—as easily recognizable as G-men in an American movie—in position around the observatory. He stayed on the tram, returning later to reconnoitre, but he could never live there again.
The raid changed his destiny: here ended any aspiration to a life of normality. He had played with the idea of becoming a teacher, earning extra cash by tutoring (though he normally tried to convert his pupils to Marxism), charging ten kopecks an hour. That was all over now. Henceforth he lived on others, expecting friends, sympathizers or the Party to fund his philanthropic revolutionary mission. He instantly entered what Trotsky called “that very serious game called revolutionary conspiracy”—a murky terrorist netherworld with its own special customs, fastidious etiquette and brutal rules.
38
In Russia, the mercantile and middle classes, who had no access to political power, often sympathized with the revolutionaries, but in Georgia they could also count on local patriotism—and a web of family clans reaching the highest nobility. The Shervashidzes managed to be top Petersburg courtiers while on their Abkhazian estates enjoying links to the revolutionaries. Prince Giorgi Shervashidze was Chancellor of the Court of the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna, Alexander III’s widow and Nicholas II’s mother. After the Revolution and until the 1930s, the Shervashidzes who remained in the USSR were protected by the local Bolshevik leader and Stalin courtier Nestor Lakoba.
39
The most important Russian revolutionary in Georgia then was tall, stooped, balding Victor Kurnatovsky, who had shared Lenin’s Siberian exile and even met Plekhanov in Zurich. Many of the most active revolutionaries were not Caucasians but Russians. In the railway depot, Sergei Alliluyev was assisted by the affable, ginger-bearded Mikhail Kalinin, another railway worker of peasant origins whom Soso was to meet now: he would be Stalin’s long-serving head of state. The other leaders were Georgians—Jordania, Jibladze, Mikha Tskhakaya and Philip Makharadze, all founders of the Third Group back in 1892.