Stalin: A Biography

I’m so very grateful to you, deeply respected Olga Yevgenevna, for your good and pure feelings towards me. I shall never forget your caring attitude to me! I look forward to the moment when I’m liberated from exile and can come to Petersburg [as the Bolsheviks continued to call the capital] and personally thank you and Sergei for everything. I’ve only got two years at most left.

I received the parcel. Thank you. I only ask one thing: don’t waste any more on me; you yourselves need the money. I’ll be happy if from time to time you send postcards with scenes of nature and the like. Nature in this accursed district is appallingly barren — the river in the summer and snow in winter are all nature provides here, and I’m driven mad with longing for scenes of nature even if they are only on paper.

Stalin did not often behave gracefully, but he could when he wanted.

He was not entirely removed from active politics. The trial of the Bolshevik Duma faction and its adviser Lev Kamenev in early 1915 in Petrograd had brought disruption to Bolshevism. The charges related to both politics and revolutionary etiquette. Instead of just denouncing the Imperial government, Kamenev had distanced himself from Lenin’s policy that the best result in the war for the European Marxist movement would be the defeat of the Russian armed forces by the Germans. Even so, Kamenev could not escape a sentence of Siberian exile. On arrival in Turukhansk District he was again put on ‘party trial’. The proceedings took place in Monastyrskoe, and Sverdlov and Stalin were present, as were the members of the Bolshevik Duma fraction. Most participants chose to support Lenin’s policy.³¹ Stalin was friends with Kamenev; they remained on these terms throughout their Siberian exile and for several years subsequently. Stalin, though, jibbed at Kamenev’s failure in open court in Petrograd to show solidarity with the faction’s official policy. Probably Stalin had reservations about Lenin’s calls for ‘European Civil War’ as a realistic policy both militarily and politically; but Kamenev needed to be pulled back into line. Discipline was discipline. Kamenev had committed an infringement and had to be punished.

Stalin started to enjoy life in Kureika. He took up fishing: this brought an enhancement of his diet as well as genuine pleasure. He had had lessons from the Ostyak men and soon, according to his own account, got better at it than the Ostyaks themselves. Supposedly they asked him what his secret was.³² In any case, he was locally accepted and became known as Osip (or, less pleasantly, as Pockmarked Oska).³³

Fishing in Siberian exile could be dangerous, as he later recalled:³⁴ ‘It happened that the tempest caught me on the river. At one time it seemed that I was done for. But I made it to the bank. I didn’t believe I’d get there: the river was in great tumult.’ On another occasion a snowstorm blew up. He had had a good day by the water along with Ostyaks from his village and had a large haul of sturgeon and sea-salmon.³⁵ Foolishly he went off home before the others. The storm — known in Siberia as a purga — blew up suddenly. It was too late to turn back and it was a long way in nearly blinding conditions to Kureika. If he had been sensible, he would have abandoned the fish. But the fish were his food for the month; and anyway Stalin was stubborn. He trudged through the heavy snow, head down into the bitter wind. By the light of a new moon he thought he glimpsed shadowy figures near by; he called out to them, relying on the local tradition of helping strangers in a mess. But the figures moved on. They were in fact the villagers with their dogs whom he had left earlier; and when they saw the snow-covered, gesticulating form, they credulously assumed it was a water demon. Stalin himself was not sure that the figures had been human beings and did not try to catch up with them.³⁶