Stalin: A Biography

If Joseph mourned him, he left no sign of it; indeed it is not even known how quickly he learned of Beso’s death. Dzhughashvili’s focus in this period was on evading arrest. He was adept at the techniques. But his recurrent success at foiling the police again led to the rumour that he had a dubious association with the Imperial authorities. Was he an employee of the Okhrana? The Menshevik Isidore Ramishvili in 1905 had accused him of being ‘a government agent, spy and provocateur’.¹⁵ Such unsubstantiated tales were repeated down the years. There has even been an allegation that the Okhrana file on him was passed around the party in the 1920s and that Stalin instigated the Great Terror in the late 1930s mainly in order to eliminate those who had been initiated into knowledge of his employment.¹⁶ In fact the most exigent analysis of the evidence gives no serious grounds for thinking that Dzhughashvili was a police agent. This does not mean that he failed to exploit whatever links he had with the Okhrana. He was arrested and interrogated many times. It is easily credible that he let drop information which would incriminate the enemies of his faction or even his rivals inside the faction. There were recurrent queries in particular about Stepan Shaumyan’s arrest and apparently some fellow Bolsheviks sought to call Dzhughashvili before a party tribunal. Arrest and exile spared Dzhughashvili this fate.¹⁷ Shaumyan was the other towering figure of Bolshevism in the south Caucasus; it would have been in character for the ambitious Dzhughashvili to get him out of the way.

Yet the Okhrana preferred to keep its main informers out of prison; and Dzhughashvili, although he sometimes received light sentences, was incarcerated or exiled too frequently and lengthily to have been a police employee. He was to spend the Great War through to the February 1917 Revolution in Siberia even though the state authorities could have used him productively if he really had been working for them.

Clandestine political activity was complex and demanding, and Dzhughashvili’s leading position required that he kept a wide range of acquaintances and sources of information. Comrades were among these; they were indispensable if a solid revolutionary core was going to be maintained. But he also had to seek information on a wider plain. Inhabiting working-class areas where informers were many and where imprisonment was a constant danger, a revolutionary leader had to live on his wits — and Dzhughashvili was remarkable for his number of contacts. The Georgian Menshevik Artëm Gio left an account of the rounding up of Marxist militants in Tbilisi. Bursting into a friend’s flat, Dzhughashvili was astonished to find Gio waiting for him there. ‘I just wasn’t expecting it,’ he exclaimed: ‘How has it happened? Haven’t you been arrested?’¹⁸ Gio was explaining how he had evaded the fate of others, when in walked a stranger. Dzhughashvili reassured Gio: ‘You can talk freely and boldly… He’s a comrade of mine.’ The newcomer turned out to be a Georgian who worked as a police interpreter. He had rushed over to tell Dzhughashvili the latest news: several close comrades (including Dzhughashvili’s future father-in-law Sergei Alliluev) had been taken into custody. In fact a detachment had already been assigned to arrest Dzhughashvili in the evening. The interpreter, however, was disconcerted by Gio’s presence and, once he had passed on his information, he ran off.¹⁹

This was an obscure but significant episode in Dzhughashvili’s career. It showed that he got up to pretty unorthodox business; for his interpreter was not a Marxist militant but — in Dzhughashvili’s words — ‘a great nationalist’.²⁰ The interpreter so hated Russian Imperial rule that he willingly helped other opponents of tsarism: he deliberately mistranslated words so as to save Georgian militants from trouble. Gio’s memoir was an unusual one. Bolsheviks were conventionally depicted as having nothing to do with the police, and it cannot be discounted that his book was published in 1925 in Leningrad only because Stalin’s factional adversary Zinoviev controlled the press in that city and wanted to besmirch his reputation. Yet the making of revolution in the Russian Empire required multifarious talents and a flexible moral code. Dzhughashvili possessed the qualifications.