He was not ineffective in Batumi. He worked with fellow Marxists and pipeline and port workers to stir up revolt against the employers. Contact was made with likely recruits to the party. The Rothschild and Mantashëv enterprises were his favourite spots. At the same time he kept in contact with Ketskhoveli hundreds of miles east in Baku. Strikes broke out in Batumi and Dzhughashvili and his group were involved. He was doing what his ideology and policies induced him to do. He was involved, too, in the organisation of a protest demonstration by workers on 8 March 1902. They were demanding the release of strike leaders imprisoned a few days earlier. The demonstration had fatal consequences. The town authorities panicked at the sight of six thousand angry marching workers and troops fired on them. Fifteen demonstrators were killed. A massive Okhrana investigation followed. There were hundreds of arrests. Police spies had penetrated the Batumi Marxist organisation and it was only a matter of time before Dzhughashvili’s whereabouts were discovered. He was taken into custody on 5 April and detained in Batumi Prison.
One resident, Hashim Smyrba, regretted Dzhughashvili’s departure. Dzhughashvili had stayed for a while in hiding with him. Hashim, a peasant who was probably an Abkhazian, took to him and expressed regret that he wasn’t a Moslem: ‘Because if you adopted the Moslem faith, I’d find you seven beautiful women to marry.’25 The scene was recounted to indicate that Dzhughashvili had always had the common touch. But Smyrba was an elderly peasant outside the revolutionary movement. The fact that few workers testified on Dzhughashvili’s behalf decades after his stay in Batumi was surely significant. He kept himself to himself. He was self-sufficient and did not want to rely on others when he did not need to. Already he was something of a loner.
Dzhughashvili in any case no longer depended on the goodwill of comrades in Batumi or Tbilisi. He kept in close contact with his friend Ketskhoveli in Baku. His article on ‘The Russian Social-Democratic Party and its Immediate Tasks’, covering many political and organisational questions of the day, was the main item in the second issue of
Reportedly Ketskhoveli swore at him for being too moderate; but Dzhughashvili was to claim that until the shooting of workers in Batumi in March 1902 he had been justified in his measured tone. All then changed: ‘The tone was altered.’ Never again did Dzhughashvili hold back in contest with the opponents of Marxism in Georgia or the Russian Empire as a whole.28 Ketskhoveli and Dzhughashvili were discovering for themselves that their basic inclinations were not peculiar to them or to Georgia. In December 1900 some Russian émigré Marxists, on the initiative of Lenin, had founded