In return for sometimes huge salaries, these double-agents not only penetrated the “internal life of the revolutionary organizations” but also sometimes directed them. The Okhrana even set up their own revolutionary groups and trade unions. And their very existence was designed to inspire a cannibalistic frenzy of suspicion and paranoia among the revolutionaries. The craziness of Stalinist terror in the USSR shows how successful they were. Yet konspiratsia could be as dangerous for the authorities as for the terrorists.[42]
Russia faced a blossoming of conspiracies in this war on terror: the Okhrana had to foil not only the Social-Democrats, the Armenian nationalist Dashnaks and the Georgian Socialist-Federalists but Russia’s most deadly terrorists, populist socialists called the Socialist-Revolutionaries, the SRs. In the best example of the danger of double-agents, the Okhrana recruited Evano Azef, head of the SR Fighting Brigade, which effectively used suicide bombers. During 1902–5, Azef received massive payments, but simultaneously he arranged the assassination of two Interior Ministers and a Grand Duke.
Yet overall, despite Okhrana-Gendarme rivalry and bureaucratic muddle, the secret-police suppression and infiltration of the revolutionaries was astonishingly subtle and successfuclass="underline" they were the best secret services of their day.[43] Indeed Lenin copied the Okhrana to organize “a few professionals as highly trained and experienced as the secret police with conspiratorial techniques at the highest level of perfection.”
Stalin was precisely such a man; this “world apart” was his natural habitat. In the Caucasus, it was even harder to make sense of the game. A Georgian upbringing was the ideal training for the terrorist-gangster, based on sacred loyalty to family and friends, fighting skill, personal largesse and the art of vengeance, all punched into Stalin on Gori back-streets. The Caucasian secret police were more violent yet more venal. Stalin became eerily adept at corrupting them and at divining their spies.{89}
Stalin was constantly tailed by Okhrana spooks whom he became expert at foxing: “Those dolts,” he laughed as he pulled off another serpentine escape in the backstreets of Tiflis. “Are we supposed to teach them how to do their own jobs?”{90} He avoided the arrests that followed his May Day bedlam, but he had close misses. Once he was singing Georgian songs in an illicit bookshop when the police surrounded the place: he walked right past the “dumb policemen.” Another time at a revolutionary meeting, the police raided the house, but Stalin and his friends jumped out of the window into the rain without their galoshes, roaring with laughter.{91}
He changed names—he used the alias “David” at this time—and lodged in at least six apartments. When he was staying with his friend Mikha Bochoridze, the police raided the house (where Kamo would later take the money after the Tiflis heist). Stalin pretended to be a sick tenant, lying in bed, shrouded in sheets and bandages. The police searched the house but, having no orders about an invalid, they went to consult their officers. They were sent back to arrest the “patient,” who meanwhile had made a swift recovery—and exit.{92}
Between escapes and meetings, Stalin was busy writing his first articles in a catechismic, romantic and apocalyptic style. Lado had teamed up with Abel Yenukidze, a sandy-haired, genial ex-seminarist and womanizer, to create a radical newspaper Brdzola (Struggle), which they printed on an illegal printing-press in Baku.{93}
The police spies hunted and sometimes even caught up with him: on 27 and 28 October 1901, they observed “Intellectual Josef Djugashvili leading a meeting” at the Melani Tavern.
On 11 November, he was one of those running a city conference attended by about twenty-four Marxists. Here he was attacked by the moderates as a “slanderer.” They would all have known of Jibladze’s accusations against the “obnoxious” Soso, but they also recognized his energy, competence and ruthlessness. Stalin, following Lenin’s vision of a militant sect of professional revolutionaries, warned of the dangers of electing ordinary workers to their Committee because “police agents would be elected.” Instead the conference elected a committee of four workers and four intellectuals.
His many enemies surely demanded his expulsion, later claiming that he was driven out of Tiflis. This wishful thinking has been repeated by historians ever since. Fortunately, the Gendarme agents, who were better informed and whose reports were written that day, reveal that Soso was elected as the fourth intellectual. But perhaps this was part of a compromise that killed two birds with one stone. He was elected to the Committee, joining the leadership for the first time, but as the secret police were closing in, he was “rescued” (and his comrades rescued from his malevolent machinations) by being sent on “a propaganda mission”—conveniently far away from Tiflis.
The Gendarmes noticed that the newly elected, ever-present Stalin missed his Committee meeting on 25 November 1901—and, as ever like Macavity, T. S. Eliot’s elusive cat, disappeared into thin air.
He was in fact on the train to Batumi, turbulent oil port of the Russian Empire, where he would spread blood and fire.{94}
10. “I’m Working for the Rothschilds!”—Fire, Massacre and Arrest in Batumi
Comrade Soso brought his new merciless style to Batumi with a vengeance. Within three months of his move to the seaside boom-town, the Rothschilds’ refinery had mysteriously caught fire. A militant strike had led to the storming of the prison and a Cossack massacre. The town was flooded with Marxist pamphlets; informers were being murdered, horses slaughtered, factory managers shot. Soso was in a feud with the old-style Georgian revolutionaries and was having an affair with a married girl while the secret police hunted him down.
He hit the ground running in Batumi. He rendezvoused at a tavern in the Turkish Bazaar with Constantine Kandelaki, a worker and Social-Democrat, who became his Batumi henchman. He ordered Kandelaki to call a series of meetings. “At an agreed knock, we opened the door,” wrote one of the local workers, Porfiro Kuridze, who confronted “a slim young and energetic man, with black hair,” worn very long.
“Nobody knew his name,” records Domenti Vadachkoria, who held one of these meetings at his apartment. “It was just a young man in a black shirt, a long summer coat and a fedora.” Already something of a veteran in konspiratsia and a believer in his own instinctive eye for traitors, Stalin ordered Vadachkoria to “invite seven workers to a meeting” but “asked me to show him the invited workers.” He stood at the window while “I walked the invited workers one by one along the lane. Stalin asked me not to invite one of them. He was an amazing conspirator and knew human nature well. He could look at someone and see right through them. I told him a man wanted to work with us.” The man’s name was Karzkhiya.
“That guy’s a spook,” said Stalin. Shortly afterwards, continues Vadachkoria, “when Cossacks broke up a meeting, we saw that man in a policeman’s uniform. It was decided to wipe him out. He was killed.” Here is the first instance when Stalin sniffs out a traitor and has him killed, probably his first murder.[44] In any case, henceforth, he played rough in “the serious game of conspiracy.” There would be other Karzkhiyas. But even then he left what he called the “black work”—the killing—to his henchmen.
42
During the 1880s, Colonel G. P. Sudeikin of the Petersburg Okhrana cultivated a young People’s Will terrorist named Degaev, a success that allowed the policeman to become “the master of revolution in Russia.” But this had a price: the Colonel was even forced to order murders to conceal his double-agent. Then in 1883 Degaev lured him to a meeting and murdered him. Degaev ultimately disappeared. Years later, a mathematics professor in an obscure U.S. midwestern university was exposed as none other than Degaev, a story finely told in Richard Pipes’s
43
The Okhrana could not afford to ignore the ingenuity of the SR assassins. In a foreshadowing of al-Qaeda and 9/11, the success of aeroplane flight suggested these new machines as weapons. SR terrorists considered flying a dynamite-packed biplane into the Winter Palace, so the Okhrana in 1909 ordered the monitoring of all flights as well as people learning to fly and members of aero-clubs. It is a mark of the Okhrana’s excellence that in 1909 it was imaginative enough to envisage a crime that was beyond the scope of the FBI and CIA in the twenty-first century.
44
The dates of these memoirs are always important. In memoirs dictated in 1936, Vadachkoria implies that it was Stalin who ordered the murder, a naïve thing to record that year; an unthinkable thing to record a year later during the Great Terror, or afterwards. The story of Stalin just