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

In 1905 Stalin finally met the only man he ever recognized as his leader, Lenin. Koba went, under the name of Ivanovich, as one of three delegates from the Caucasus to a clandestine congress of the Russian Social Democrat Party, held at Tampere in Finland which, though in the Russian empire, offered some protection against arrest. In Tampere Koba met, most for the first time, forty other delegates of the Russian Social Democrat Party. He became known to some who would lead the Bolshevik uprising twelve years later: Lenin, Iakov Sverdlov, Leonid Krasin. Koba won praise from Lenin for his report on the Caucasus and for his hard-line stance. Back in Tbilisi early in 1906, Koba could proclaim himself as “the Lenin of the Caucasus.” He finally had authority.

The first murder in which Stalin was implicated occurred on January 16, 1906. General Griaznov, who had smashed down the barricades erected during the workers’ insurrection in Tbilisi the previous month, was “sentenced to death” by the party and killed. Koba had fallen off a tram and was lying up with head injuries when the police searched for him. Despite being a wanted escaped prisoner, Koba had had an extraordinarily easy journey to Finland and back. Understandably, other party members wondered if Koba was a police agent. He subsequently claimed to have been arrested early in April 1906 but his name is missing from Tbilisi’s Metekhi prison register. ²⁰ Soon Koba was again off north, under the name of Vissarionovich, this time to Stockholm to the fourth Social Democrat Party congress while the gendarmes, uncannily tipped off, were raiding the socialist printing presses in Tbilisi.

Stockholm attracted many more delegates than Tampere. Here Stalin saw the doyen of Russian Marxism, Giorgi Plekhanov, as well as familiar Tbilisi faces such as Mikhail Kalinin. He also first encountered two men who would be instrumental in his struggle for total power: the first head of the Soviet secret police, Feliks , and Klim Voroshilov, future commissar for defense and eventual butcher of the Red Army. Koba shared a hotel room in Stockholm with Voroshilov (an uneducated metalworker endowed with the voice of an opera singer). Koba and Klim bonded, master and servant, for life. As for those who would be killed by Stalin after they attained power, Koba first met in Stockholm Andrei Bubnov, Aleksandr Smirnov, and Aleksei Rykov. In Stockholm Koba briefly acquired a suit, a tie, a hat, and a pipe (the latter the only one of these bourgeois accessories he retained).

Back in Tbilisi, when Kato Svanidze realized she was pregnant, Koba married her, at one in the morning. They enjoyed little conjugal life: Koba was off to Baku, and the gendarmes arrested Kato for sheltering revolutionaries on the run. It took six weeks to free Kato: her sister, Aleksandra Monaselidze-Svanidze, went to see the wife of a gendarme colonel whose dresses she made. The colonel secured for Kato visits from Koba (allegedly her cousin) and then release, and at the same time a reprieve for Kato’s real cousin, who was to be hanged.

Stalin took up writing again, not lyrical poetry but political prose. He compiled in Georgian treatises on socialism and anarchism which were published in the periodicals Akhali droeba

(New Times) and

Chveni tskhovreba (Our

Life). The birth of a son, Iakov, on March 18, 1907, did not distract him. A month later, the sole Bolshevik at liberty to travel from Transcaucasia to the fifth Social Democrat congress, Koba was in Copenhagen. The Danish government succumbed to Russian protests and the congress moved to London. On his way Stalin apparently visited Lenin in Berlin, where they agreed to authorize a bank robbery by Kamo Ter-Petrosiants to fund their activities—against party policy, for the fifth congress was about to vote for the ballot box and against the gun.

Koba returned to Georgia via Paris on a dead Georgian’s passport; his first exploit was to organize a spectacular robbery, carried out by Kamo on June 13, 1907, in the middle of Tbilisi. Koba put Kamo in touch with an old school friend who worked in the posts and telegraph at Gori, and he provided information on the transportation of bank-notes. The robbery netted a quarter of a million rubles, unfortunately in 500-ruble notes the numbers of which were circulated throughout Europe. Kamo’s hand grenades killed and maimed about fifty people, mostly bystanders, and Koba was expelled from the Caucasian Social Democrat Party for terrorism.

With his wife and infant son, Koba retreated east to Baku where he could rely on Bolshevik supporters among the oil workers. A new ally and eventual victim, Sergo Orjonikidze, joined Koba’s circle. Stalin’s authority derived from his unofficial mandate from Lenin; it is likely that he made two more journeys to see Lenin—in August 1907 to Stuttgart and to Switzerland in January 1908.