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As Soso entered this secret world, he pushed ahead with the plans for an aggressive May Day demonstration.

The governor-general of the Caucasus, Prince Golitsyn, marched Cossacks, Dragoons, artillery and infantry into Tiflis for a showdown. They bivouacked in the squares. On the morning of Sunday, 22 April 1901, some 3,000 workers and revolutionaries gathered outside the Soldiers Bazaar. The Cossacks had other ideas, but Soso was prepared. Sergei Alliluyev noticed that the activists were “unseasonably dressed in heavy overcoats and Caucasian sheepskin hats.” When he asked why, a comrade answered: “Soso’s orders.”

“What for?”

“We’ll be the first to receive the Cossack whips.”

Indeed the Cossacks waited in every courtyard down Golovinsky Prospect. At noon, “the garrison gun boomed;” the demonstrators started to march up Golovinsky to Yerevan Square, where the seminarists were to join them, singing “The Marseillaise” and “The Warsawianka.” The Cossacks galloped down on them, drawing sabres and brandishing their heavy nagaika whips that could kill a man. The pharaohs—the police—advanced, sabres drawn. A forty-five-minute pitched battle of “desperate encounters” broke out down the boulevard as the Cossacks charged any group larger than three people. The red banners—declaring DOWN WITH TYRANNY—were passed from hand to hand. Fourteen workers were seriously wounded and fifty arrested. Martial law was declared in Tiflis.{87}

This was Stalin’s first success. While the genteel Jordania was arrested and imprisoned for a year, his Kvali closed, Stalin just fled to Gori for a few days. No wonder Jordania loathed this young hothead, but Stalin had just started. He and his allies were soon keen to intensify the “open struggle”—even if it cost “torrents of blood.”

These young radicals discussed the murder of Captain Lavrov, the deputy chief of the Gendarmes in Tiflis, but the real action was in the railway depots where the railways director, Vedenev, energetically resisted Stalin’s strikes.

Stalin now met another partner-in-crime, Stepan Shaumian, the well-off, highly educated son of an Armenian businessman. Shaumian, closely connected with the plutocracy of the Caucasus, was tutor to the children of the city’s richest oil baron, Mantashev, and he soon married the daughter of a top oil executive.

“Tall, well built and very handsome with a pale face and light-blue eyes,” Shaumian helped organize a solution to the problem of Vedenev: the railway boss was sitting in his office when a pistol, pointed through his window, shot him through the heart.

No one was caught.{88} But this shot marked the start of a new era in which “all tender feeling for family, friendship, love, gratitude and even honour, must,” according to the much-read Revolutionary Catechism of the nihilist Nechaev, “be squashed by the sole passion for revolutionary work.” The amoral rules—or rather the lack of them—were described by both sides as konspiratsia, the “world apart” that is vividly drawn in Dostoevsky’s novel The Devils. Without understanding konspiratsia, it is impossible to understand the Soviet Union itself: Stalin never left this world. Konspiratsia became the ruling spirit of his Soviet state—and of his state of mind.

Henceforth, Stalin usually carried a pistol in his belt. Secret policemen and revolutionary terrorists now became professional secret fighters in the duel for the Russian Empire.[40]

9. Stalin Goes Underground: Konspiratsia

Just at this time, the Gori priest’s son Kote Charkviani was arguing with a street-cleaner on a Tiflis backstreet when a familiar voice said: “Smash him up, Kote. Don’t be afraid, he’s the tamed street hound of the Gendarmes!” It was Soso, who could divine a traitor or a spy almost by instinct. He could not hang around to chat. The secret police were after him.

Then “he disappeared into the narrow curved street…” But that conspiratorial instinct was an essential quality in this game of mist, mirrors and shadows. The antagonists were locked in an intimate, desperate and amoral embrace in which agents, double-agents and treble-agents promised, betrayed, switched sides and betrayed again their allegiances.

In the 1870s, the rebels were middle-class populists, narodniki, who hoped that the liberal future lay with the pure peasantry. A faction of narodniki developed into the terrorist groups Land and Freedom and later People’s Will, who believed that the murder of Emperor Alexander II would achieve revolution.

People’s Will embraced the ideas of the small-time philosopher Nechaev whose amoral Revolutionary Catechism begot Lenin and Stalin. “Regroup this world of brigands into an indivisible destructive force,” he suggested, killing police “in the most agonizing way.” The anarchist Bakunin shared that dream of harnessing the “swashbuckling robber-world” to the Revolution. Lenin borrowed the disciplined organization, total dedication and the gangsterish brutality of the People’s Will, qualities that Stalin personified.

Alexander II, faced with a terroristic cat-and-mouse game, started to create a modern security service as sophisticated as the terrorists themselves. He reorganized his father’s Third Section into a plainclothed secret police, the Division for Protection of Order and Social Security, soon shortened to “Okhrana.” Yet, throughout the reforms, the People’s Will actually had an agent within the department. The police hunted down the terrorists, but it was too late. In 1881, they got their man, killing Alexander II on the streets of St. Petersburg.

His heir, Alexander III, created the double system that Stalin knew. Both the Okhrana and the prestigious semi-military Gendarmes, the “Tsar’s eyes and ears,” dressed in a fine blue white-trimmed uniform with boots and sabre, ran their own intelligence services.

At its elegant headquarters at 16 Fontanka by the Moika in Petersburg, the Okhrana Special Section meticulously collated labyrinthine charts and colour-coded files of terror groups. Their bureaux noirs practised perlustratsia (perlustration): 380,000 letters annually were being opened by 1882.[41] They had a reputation in Europe as the sinister organ of Autocracy but never even approached the brutal competence of Lenin’s Cheka, let alone Stalin’s NKVD. They wielded three punishments. The rope was rarely used, being reserved for assassins of Romanovs and ministers, but it had one decisive effect: the execution of Alexander Ulyanov, a young man on the edge of a conspiracy against the Tsar, helped radicalize his younger brother, Lenin. Next was katorga, hard labour, again quite rare. The most common punishment was “administrative exile,” for periods of up to five years.

The mastermind of konspiratsia, Moscow Okhrana chief Zubatov, evolved a new system of surveillance. Detectives were employed, but their real tools were the agentura, the “external agent”—the shpik, or “spook,” in revolutionary vernacular—who followed characters like Stalin. The Okhrana’s most effective tactic was the provokatsia—the provocations of their “internal agents.” The secret policeman should treat his agent provocateur like “a beloved woman with whom you have entered illicit relations,” explained Zubatov. “Look after her like the apple of your eye. One careless move and you dishonour her… Never reveal the name of your informer to anyone, even your director. Forget his name and remember only his pseudonym.” The stakes were high: one side’s provokator was the other’s predatel (traitor), who faced death.

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Going underground meant that Stalin also avoided conscription into the army in 1901. On his last arrest in 1913, he told the police he had been “exempted from conscription for family reasons in 1901.” The Gori police officer Davrichewy helped provide the paperwork enabling him to escape military service, according to his son’s memoirs, possibly by citing Stalin’s family problems and also moving his birthday a year later to 21 December 1879. Stalin was not bothered by conscription again until 1916.

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When Interior Minister Plehve was assassinated in 1904, his police director, Lopukhin, found forty of his own private letters in the dead man’s safe: the Minister was perlustrating his own chief of police.