Stalin: A Biography

Their geographical knowledge was faulty. There were two places called Kureika north of Monastyrskoe. The one which Sverdlov had in mind was by the river of the same name far beyond the Arctic Circle. The governor had specified another Kureika, which stood on the western bank of the River Yenisei just below the line. Even so, it was seventy-five miles downriver from Monastyrskoe, and that was quite far enough to lower their spirits.¹⁸

Although the location was not as bad as they had feared, it was quite bad enough. Stalin made his own contribution to the unpleasantness. In Monastyrskoe he had taken possession of books bequeathed to resident Bolsheviks by fellow exile Innokenti Dubrovinski. When Stalin moved on to Kureika, he simply took the books off with him. Another Bolshevik, Filip Zakharov, went out to remonstrate with him and was treated ‘more or less as a tsarist general would receive a rank-and-file soldier who had dared to appear before him with a demand’.¹⁹

Stalin and Sverdlov disliked the noisiness of the Kureika family they lodged with. They had no kerosene and had to use candles if they wanted to read during the long winter.²⁰ But the worst thing was the relationship between them. Sverdlov wrote:²¹ ‘One thing is that I don’t have a room to myself. There are two of us. I’ve got the Georgian Dzhughashvili with me, an old acquaintance whom I met in a previous exile. He’s a fine fellow but too big an individualist in daily life.’ ‘Individualist’ was a damning word among Marxists, who required the subordination of personal inclinations to collective needs. Driven to distraction, Sverdlov decided to move house; he wrote to a friend in May 1914:²²

I have a comrade with me. But we know each other only too well. What is more, and this is the saddest thing, a person is stripped bare in front of you in conditions of exile and imprisonment and becomes exposed in every little detail. Worst of all, he is visible solely from the viewpoint of ‘the details of daily life’. There’s no room for the large features of character to reveal themselves. Now I live in a separate apartment from the com[rade], and we rarely see each other.

Sverdlov got himself transferred back to Selivanikha at the end of September on grounds of ill health.²³

Stalin meanwhile got on with life in his own egocentric fashion. He had always had an eye for adolescent girls but when he moved in as a lodger with the Pereprygin family, he behaved quite scandalously by seducing the fourteen-year-old daughter. Not only that: he made her pregnant. Even in that lightly administered area it was impossible to keep things quiet. The police became involved. Stalin was interviewed, and had to agree in due course to marry the unfortunate girl. This saved him from prosecution in the courts.²⁴ He subsequently abrogated the accord. For Stalin, the relationship was no more than a way of relieving the sexual frustrations of exile. He lived like a feudal knight among the impoverished Pereprygin family and took what he fancied whenever he liked. He acted as if he had rights without obligations. He had contempt for all human conduct but his own.

His political activity was weakened by the fact that his postal contact with the world outside Kureika was intermittent.²⁵ This was intensely irritating because war had broken out in Europe. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by a Serbian nationalist in July 1914 had provoked a general diplomatic crisis. The Austrian government had delivered a humiliating ultimatum to Serbia. Russia, which had stepped back from the brink in previous emergencies in the Balkans, decided to take the Serbian side. Austria’s expansion into the region was to be resisted at last. The complication was that Germany had opted to stand by Austria in the event of a Balkan crisis. The Russian Imperial Army mobilised and Nicholas II refused to stand it down when the Germans delivered an ultimatum to St Petersburg. Russian forces poured through East Prussia towards Berlin. Austria occupied Serbia. France and the United Kingdom honoured their treaty obligations and declared war on Russia’s side against Germany and Austria–Hungary. The German Imperial Army defended itself in the east and, violating the neutrality of Belgium, thrust across into northern France. Without anyone having intended it, a European war had broken out.