Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

Isolated from his friends, the young Stalin had to seek support from Russian socialists whom the authorities had rashly exiled to Tbilisi from St. Petersburg. Thus in 1900 Stalin began his network. His first significant contact was a Russian exile working in the railway workshops, Mikhail Kalinin. Stalin would later maintain Kalinin for twenty-eight years as his front man, the puppet head of the Soviet state from 1918 to 1946. Kalinin, all his life a dog in search of a master, would prove an archetypical Stalinist employee, but in 1900 another Russian contact, Dr. Viktor Kurnatovsky, seemed more useful to Stalin. Kurnatovsky was an educated Marxist, the friend of another Caucasian Bolshevik, Sergei Alliluev, and the lover of his wife: Kurnatovsky thus introduced Stalin to the Marxist underground and to his future father-in-law.

Within a year Jughashvili, an obscure clerk, was again a wanted man. Of twenty-nine Russian “social democratic revolutionary party” members listed by the Tbilisi gendarmerie in early 1901, Viktor Kurnatovsky, Pilipe Makharadze, and Ioseb Jughashvili were singled out as dangerous. Jughashvili was noted as “an intellectual who leads a group of railway workers . . . behaving very cautiously, always looks around when walking . . .”

In 1901 Stalin began sixteen formative years of life on the run, in prison, or in exile. He had no address he could call home, and no serious expectations of settling down, let alone achieving power. He visited Gori only when the gendarmes made Tbilisi too hot for him. He organized demonstrations and set up an illegal printshop.

Even in his early twenties Stalin attached himself to two sorts of men. One sort, like Kalinin and Kurnatovsky—doctrinaire, self-educated Marxists—would constitute his inner circle. The other sort were killers. In 1901, Stalin took up with the first of the many criminals that he was to use and employ: a half-Georgian, half-Armenian youth, Simon (Kamo) Ter-Petrosiants. Stalin had known Kamo since childhood; the Ter-Petrosiants and Jughashvili families were neighbors. Kamo would soon be the Caucasus’s most notorious bandit: his bloody “expropriations” of millions of rubles from mail coaches and post offices funded the Bolsheviks’ arms and propaganda and alienated “legal” Marxists from their violent Bolshevik fellow travelers. In 1901 Kamo was only nineteen. Expelled from school for professing atheism, he now sought expertise in explosives and arms by applying to enter Tbilisi’s military academy.

At the end of 1901 Jughashvili took cover in Batumi from the gendarmes. Batumi was then, as today, Georgia’s second city, a lawless port influenced as much by Turkey and Islam as by Russia. Here the oil terminals, the Rothschild factory, and the port had built up a critical mass of disaffected proletarians. This was no provincial exile for Stalin but a chance to make his mark. For the first time he encountered an urban proletariat. That he, a stranger from Tbilisi, made an impact in an industrial area where many workers spoke little Georgian, says something for the force of his personality. Within two months he was making furtive trips to Tbilisi to fetch machinery for printing leaflets in Georgian and Armenian. He was helped by a twenty-year-old Armenian, Suren Spandaryan, the editor of Nor Dar (New

Century) and son of a typesetter. Spandaryan was, until his death in 1916, one of the few people Stalin might have called a friend and whose death he, if perfunctorily, mourned.

In early 1902 Tbilisi’s social democrat revolutionaries were crushed by the police. In Batumi, however, the strikes that Stalin had helped foment were victorious. By April 1902, though, Jughashvili was arrested for “incitement to disorder and insubordination against higher authority.” He was cursorily examined by a doctor, Grigol Eliava, who gave the first objective description of Stalin: “height 1.64, long, swarthy, pockmarked face, second and third toes on left foot joined . . . missing one front, right lower molar tooth . . . mole on left ear.”¹⁹

Stalin was no prison hero. In autumn he implored Prince Golitsyn, the viceroy of the Caucasus: “An increasingly choking cough and the helpless position of my elderly mother, abandoned by her husband twelve years ago and seeing me as her sole support in life, forces me to address the commander-in-chief’s chancellery for the second time and humbly request release under police supervision. . . .” A major of Tbilisi’s gendarmerie warned against clemency (making the young Stalin sound like an asset to the police force): “at the head of the Batumi organization is Ioseb Jughashvili, under special police supervision, Jughashvili’s despotism has enraged many people and the organization [in Batumi] has split. . . .”