Stalin: A Biography

It was nevertheless a dangerous game. Another of Dzhughashvili’s contacts was a certain Kornev. Dzhughashvili gave the code words to be used by Gio when meeting Kornev. Yet Kornev seemed shifty to Gio, who thought to himself: ‘Either he’s an Okhrana agent or a great coward!’²¹ Although he was working in a tailor’s workshop, Kornev obviously had no experience of cutting and sewing. Everything about him was suspicious. From this it was a small step to conclude that ‘in his hands was the thread by which he [thought] to infiltrate our organisations’.²² Gio made his excuses and went into hiding; his instincts told him that Dzhughashvili’s trusted contact was a police spy and that Dzhughashvili himself had been fooled. This may have been the case. Another possibility is that Dzhughashvili was more willing than most revolutionaries to take risks with the lives of his comrades. Egotistical and calculating, he judged situations in terms of his self-interest. People mattered to him only in so far as he could use them for the good of the cause or for his own political advancement and private comfort and pleasure. His recklessness in clandestine revolutionary work was of a piece with the other manifestations of his personality.

If Dzhughashvili’s relationship with the police retains some mystery, there need no longer be any doubt about another murky aspect of his activities. Before the Great War the accusation was made that he was involved in organising armed robberies and that he continued this activity even after the Fifth Party Congress banned it. The evidence for this remained shaky for a long time. Dzhughashvili, though, never expressly denied having participated in this criminal activity. For years he simply discouraged public interest in the matter; and when he mounted to supreme power, he suppressed all mention of it.

His duties in Georgia on behalf of Bolshevism stretched far beyond purely political activity. He was also involved in the organisation of ‘exes’. This was the party abbreviation for expropriations or, more directly, robberies. During the 1905–6 Revolution there were many Marxist groups across the Russian Empire involved in attempts to fund the party by thefts from banks. The Bolsheviks were among them, and Georgia was a centre for their efforts. There were good reasons for this. Banditry was common in the mountains and popular opinion was very far from regarding it as contemptible. The tradition of the abrek, who stole and murdered while cocking a snook at official authority and distributing some of his ill-gotten gains to the local poor, remained strong. (This was at the core of the novel by Alexander Qazbegi, The Patricide, which the young Joseph Dzhughashvili had so much admired.) Bolsheviks in Georgia saw themselves as canalising such customs towards a similarly altruistic purpose: the seizure of the profits of capitalism for the benefit of a party dedicated to the cause of the people. The recent Party Congress had firmly banned the organisation of exes. But the Bolshevik Centre continued to demand that they should be undertaken. Lenin and his comrades needed the money.

Dzhughashvili was the man in charge of the Georgian Bolshevik operations and the practitioner was the Armenian Semën Ter-Petrosyan who masqueraded under the pseudonym Kamo.²³ Dzhughashvili and his friend from school Joseph Davrishevi led rival groups of political robbers from houses on Mount David in Tbilisi. The police knew what was happening. One of the protégés of Joseph Davrishevi’s father Gori gendarme chief Damian Davrishevi, a certain Davydov, was in charge of policing the area. Wanting a peaceful life, Davydov asked Joseph Davrishevi to avoid making trouble on his pitch — and Davrishevi assumed that a similar approach had been made to Dzhughashvili. Davrishevi was able and daring and, although he belonged to the Social-Federalists (who were socialists but also anti-Marxists and overt nationalists), Dzhughashvili tried to get him to cross over to the Bolsheviks. Davrishevi refused. (Georgia’s Bolsheviks of course had suspected Dzhughashvili of being attracted to Georgian nationalism. Was his appeal to Davrishevi yet another piece of evidence for them?) Dzhughashvili and his fellow Bolsheviks at any rate took no notice of Davydov’s request. Incidents recurred on Mount David. The two groups went on raising their respective party finance by persuasion, fraud, extortion and armed robbery. Owners of businesses were easily intimidated. Even the entrepreneurial family of the Zubalovs, who had constructed the building that later became the Spiritual Seminary, made financial subventions to Davrishevi.²⁴ Dzhughashvili kept quiet about the names of his providers. Yet it is not unlikely that the Zubalovs, one of whose dachas in the Moscow countryside he was to occupy with his second wife from 1919, yielded to Bolshevik demands in the period of revolutionary upsurge.