Stalin: A Biography

Dzhughashvili was stranded at the time in Vologda; but the town was on a direct rail route to St Petersburg and Lenin was far from having forgotten him. A ‘party school’ had been held by Lenin in 1911 at Longjumeau outside Paris, and Dzhughashvili was one of the individuals he had wanted to have with him. ‘People like him’, he said to the Georgian Menshevik Giorgi Uratadze, ‘are exactly what I need.’³ Longjumeau was a quiet village where Lenin had devised a programme of lectures and recruited several Marxist lecturers, in addition to himself, to train younger Bolsheviks in the niceties of party doctrines and history. The objective was to inculcate an unflinching loyalty to Bolshevism among the students; and Dzhughashvili, who had yet to make his mark as a Bolshevik writer at the faction’s higher levels, was a natural choice. Another Georgian Bolshevik in Lenin’s sights was Dzhughashvili’s future associate Sergo Ordzhonikidze, who studied at Longjumeau and impressed him. Somehow or other, though, Dzhughashvili did not receive an invitation. Perhaps Lenin simply failed to get anyone to go with the message to Vologda. Ordzhonikidze at any rate impressed Lenin in Longjumeau to such an extent that he entrusted him with the practical arrangements of convoking the Prague Conference.⁴

Had Dzhughashvili attended the Longjumeau course, he would perhaps have been given this task. He would almost certainly have gone to Prague and might even have been elected to the Central Committee. He had a broader range of skills, especially as a writer and editor, than his friend Ordzhonikidze. Yet such an election would not have done him a favour. The new Central Committee included a certain Roman Malinovski, who was a paid agent of the Okhrana. All those Central Committee members who returned to the Russian Empire, except for Malinovski, had been arrested within weeks. It was also in 1912 that Malinovski, a leading trade-unionist among the metalworkers of St Petersburg, stood as Bolshevik candidate for the Fourth State Duma and won a handsome victory. The Okhrana was able to stay informed about the most influential bodies of Bolshevism — the Central Committee and the Duma faction — and to influence their discussions.

The arrest of most returning members of the Central Committee, however, turned the fortunes of Joseph Stalin. Having missed the chance to attend the Longjumeau party school or the Prague Conference, he was available for activity at the highest level of the Bolshevik faction. Lenin saw him as a man who could act for him in several capacities. Dzhughashvili was an organiser of good repute. He never complained about assignments: already his capacity for hard work was well known. Although he had had disagreements with Lenin on policy, he was not unusual in this, and anyway they concurred in 1911–12 on most practical matters affecting the Bolsheviks. He had a basic understanding of Marxist theory. He was a fluent writer and an able editor. He had a forthright manner whenever someone had to pull an individual or committee into compliance with the faction’s official line. Lenin and Grigori Zinoviev, who were temporarily in Paris before moving the Central Committee’s foreign base to Kraków in the Polish lands of the Habsburg Monarchy, decided to co-opt Dzhughashvili (or Ivanovich, as they currently referred to him) to the Central Committee. Sergo Ordzhonikidze was sent in February 1912 to Vologda to tell him the news in person.⁵

Communication with the emigration was slow and Lenin fretted: ‘There’s no word of Ivanovich. What’s happened to him? Where is he now? How is he?’⁶ By then Dzhughashvili was classified as one of the rare useful comrades. But Lenin need not have worried. Ordzhonikidze easily found the co-opted comrade in Vologda and informed him that the Central Committee wanted him to flee the town and work as one of its main leaders in the Russian Empire. At last he had joined the elite of the Bolshevik faction.