Stalin: A Biography

Dzhugashvili did not intend to stand by mother and child. He regarded women as a resource for sexual gratification and domestic comfort. He liked to relax with them socially only if they had the characteristics he found congenial. His partners had to be supportive and unchallenging. His requirement of a woman was that she should be devoted to him alone, and Kuzakova suited him for a while. Yet his liaison broke a code. Like other revolutionaries, Bolsheviks believed they had a mission to build a better world on principles of collective good. Dzhughashvili had selfishly used Kuzakova to gratify his lust, and neither then nor later did he think his attitude objectionable. This was the way he whiled away his sentence by the River Vychegda until 27 June 1911 when he was allowed to move to Vologda. He travelled to Kotlas and took the new railway westward. He never saw Solvychegodsk again.

8. AT THE CENTRE OF THE PARTY

Émigré leaders of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party had been slow to recognise Joseph Dzhughashvili as a leader of any talent. The elite’s composition was not fixed in stone, but without patronage from one of its members it was difficult for anyone to join it. Dzhughashvili did not help himself by staying in the south Caucasus and Russia. At gatherings in Tampere and Stockholm he had been forthright in his opinions. On each occasion he had made objection to Lenin,¹ who was the only leader who was ever likely to suggest including him in the Central Committee. Lenin’s focus remained on Russia; he was even willing to leave Georgia to the local Mensheviks if only they agreed to keep their noses out of Russian Marxist affairs.² Dzhughashvili dissented. For him, the industrial and commercial expansion in Baku, Tbilisi and Batumi gave the region an importance equal to the regions of central and northern Russia; and he did not change this attitude until the Bolshevik faction gave him jobs elsewhere. What was already clear was his willingness to stand up for his opinions at party gatherings outside the region. He had not joined the Marxist movement to bury his mind under the bushel of official policy.

Promotion, when it came, proceeded from the hands of Lenin. After years of uneasy and patchy co-operation with the Mensheviks Lenin had had enough. By 1911 the disadvantages of sharing a party with them as well as with the various non-Russian regional organisations outweighed the advantages. Essentially he was planning to turn the Bolshevik faction — or rather those Bolsheviks who stayed loyal to him — into the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party and to treat all other factions as if they had placed themselves outside the party’s ranks.

The Mensheviks had denounced Lenin’s sanctioning of bank robberies as a means of financing Bolshevism. They also wanted their share of the money owed to the party as a whole from the legacies inherited from two sisters called Schmidt. But Lenin aimed to hold all the funds in Bolshevik hands. This was not the only problem. The non-Russian Marxist parties — the Poles, Latvians and Lithuanians and the Jewish Bund — were causing trouble by criticising his policies. Even inside the Bolshevik faction there was dissent. Lenin had expelled Alexander Bogdanov from its midst only to find that many Bolsheviks continued to regard such schismatism as unnecessary and counter-productive. Never having been short of confidence and cunning, Lenin convoked a gathering in Prague. Despite ensuring that all but a couple of participants would be Leninist loyalists, he called it a Party Conference. Essentially he was abandoning even the semblance of collaboration within the same party as the Mensheviks. Proceedings started in January 1912. Lenin’s divisive tactics disconcerted delegates and some did not shirk from condemning his obsessive émigré polemics. But he got his way. A Party Central Committee was elected and Lenin set about acting as if the Mensheviks did not exist.