Stalin: A Biography

The national composition of the Congress was very interesting. According to the statistics, Jews constitute the majority in the Menshevik faction, followed by Georgians and Russians. In the Bolshevik faction, however, Russians are in the majority… followed by Jews, Georgians, etc. One of the Bolshevik delegates (I think it was comrade Alexinski) jokingly remarked that the Mensheviks are Jewish whereas the Bolsheviks are an authentic Russian faction; thus it would do no harm if we, the Bolsheviks, carried out a small pogrom in the party.

This is one of the first signs that Dzhughashvili recognised the importance of revolutionary propaganda, recruitment and organisation among the largest national group in the empire, the Russians.

Dzhughashvili’s comments were later used against him as proof of anti-semitism. They were certainly crude and insensitive. But they scarcely betokened hatred of all Jews — or indeed of all Georgians. He, a Georgian, was repeating something that a Russian Bolshevik had said about Russians and Jews. For many years into the future he would be the friend, associate or leader of countless individual Jews. What counted for Dzhughashvili was the march of history; he recognised that, if the Imperial monarchy was going to be overthrown, Russians as well as Jews and Georgians had to be encouraged to play an active part. What is more, he was publishing his comment three decades before Hitler’s extermination of eastern Europe’s Jews. Dzhughashvili before the Great War may not have had a special fondness for Jews as Jews, but he did not object to them either. Indeed this was his attitude to all humanity. He neither liked nor hated particular peoples; his guiding principle was to judge how they could be encouraged or compelled to abet the achievement of the kind of state and society he approved. Despite these reservations, the comment had an insensitive undertone. A pogrom was a pogrom. It signified popular mass violence against Jews. Dzhughashvili at the very least had made an unpleasant political jest. He was also implicitly suggesting that the Jewish influence in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party should be counteracted. His internationalism was not an unambiguous commitment.

Nevertheless his own national assertiveness was on the decline and he began to write not in Georgian but in Russian. His first such article appeared, after his return from London, in the Baku Bolshevik newspaper Bakinski rabochi.³⁴ From then onwards he confined his Georgian writings to letters to comrades and relatives. He largely ceased to write in his native tongue for the political public. It was a familiar step for Georgian Bolsheviks to take. To belong to the ranks of Bolshevism involved a commitment to internationalism and to the medium of Russian in the framework of organised Marxism across the empire. For a while he taught himself Esperanto. For Dzhughashvili and many young revolutionaries this language, invented by the Polish Jewish scholar Ludwig Zamenhoff, would provide one of the cultural underpinnings for the socialist order which they wanted to create around the world.³⁵

At any rate it was not suspicion of Dzhughashvili’s anti-semitism which most disturbed his acquaintances at the time. Semën Vereshchak knew him in Bailov Prison outside Baku and was struck by his personal nastiness. Dzhughashvili kept putting one prisoner against another. On two occasions this involved violence:³⁶