On the verandah of a clifftop mansion overlooking the Black Sea, Generalissimo
Stalin, ageing Soviet leader and supreme pontiff of world Marxism, sat
sharing his memories with his surviving boyhood friends over kebabs and
local red wine.
They shivered slightly when he mentioned comrades whom he had wantonly
murdered. Sometimes he mused that these Old Bolsheviks had been wrongly
executed on his own orders; but he talked about them “with the calm
detachment of a historian . . . with just a tone of light humour”, recalled
one guest.
Stalin also poignantly remembered his first wife Kato, who “was very sweet and
beautiful; she melted my heart”.
Yet Kato, too, was a victim. She died from neglect within 16 months of their
marriage. For Stalin permitted, indeed encouraged, his politics to destroy
and consume his loved ones.
In her wake came many mistresses, at least two of them in their early teens,
and a second wife who killed herself. But Kato haunted him.
They met when he was engaged in robbery and terrorism, the “black work” of
underground revolution in their native Georgia, then part of tsarist Russia.
Theirs was a true love match. Stalin was devoted to her, and she shared his
revolutionary fervour. But Stalin chose a heartless wandering existence
that, he believed, liberated him from normal morality or responsibility,
free from love itself.
This period of his life – he was in his twenties – has always been a mystery.
He covered it up because it was so disreputable. Now a wealth of material
has been found in Russian and Georgian archives that bring to life his
career as poet, trainee priest, revolutionary, gangster, husband and
prolific lover, abandoning women and illegitimate children in his wake.
They reveal a man who was never a womaniser but was never without at least one
girlfriend, and often more. Indeed in political exile in Siberia he became
almost libertine. Furthermore, he was sexually competitive, cuckolding his
comrades when it suited him.
His enigmatic mien, his arrogance, ruthlessness, feline vigilance, obsessional
studying and acute intelligence perhaps made him compelling to women.
Certainly, his apparent inability to look after himself – he was lonesome,
skinny, scruffy – made them wish to look after him.
When not being a surly brute, Stalin played the chivalrous Georgian suitor,
singing songs and admiring girls’ dresses while presenting them with silk
handkerchiefs and flowers. Stalin the flirt, the boyfriend, even the
husband, was sometimes tender and humorous. But if the ladies expected a
traditional Georgian Casanova they must have been bitterly disappointed when
they grew to know him better.
Strange, eccentric and lacking in empathy, he was riddled with complexes about
his personality, family and physique. He was so sensitive about his toes,
which were webbed, that when his feet were later being examined by his
Kremlin doctors he hid the rest of his body – and his face – under a
blanket. He had his pockmarks powdered by his bodyguards, and concealed in
official photographs.
He was shy about his own nudity even in the Russian bathhouse, and uneasy
about his stiff left arm – the result of a childhood accident – which
prevented him from slow-dancing with women: he admitted he “couldn’t take a
woman by the waist”.
As Kato learnt during their brief marriage, he was impossibly distant. His
seething, egocentric energy sucked the air from every room and wore down the
weak without giving them emotional nourishment. The tender moments could not
compensate for the detachment and morose oversensitivity. When crossed, he
turned nasty.
Women ranked low on his list of priorities, far below revolution, egotism,
intellectual pursuits and hard-drinking dinners with male friends. Combining
coarse virility with Victorian prudery, he was certainly no sensualist.
He rarely talked about his sex life, yet he was promiscuous, which may explain
his lifelong tolerance of shameless womanising in his companions. In his own
life, he regarded sex less as a moral question than as a security hazard.
On the one hand he distrusted strong clever women like his own mother,
despised pretentious women “with ideas”, and disliked glamour-pusses who
wore “boots with high heels”. He preferred young, malleable teenagers or
buxom peasant women who would defer to him.
On the other hand, he took some of his lovers from the ranks of liberated
female revolutionaries, his intellectual equals, sometimes even noblewomen,
his social superiors. But the Marxist mission, and his own sense of
separateness, always came first.
Women (and children if they inconveniently arrived) were expected to
understand when the wandering Marxist crusader chose to vanish into thin
air. Kato, his first great love, tried to understand but died in the
attempt.
JOSEF DJUGASHVILI – Soso to his boyhood friends, Stalin to posterity – was
born in 1878 in the violent town of Gori in central Georgia. Despite being
an undersized boy, he became a streetfighter, gang leader and charismatic
manipulator of his friends.
He was the son of an alcoholic and violent cobbler . . . or perhaps not: his
mother had three influential protectors – a police chief, a wrestling
champion and a priest – any one of whom might have been his father.
Extremely poor but intelligent and forceful, she used these connections to get
her rebellious son an educational scholarship at a seminary in the Georgian
capital, Tiflis, the modern Tbilisi.
It did not tame him. In the school journal the priests recorded that he was
rude, “failed to bow” to a teacher and was confined to the punishment cell
for five hours. He refused to cut his hair, laughed and chatted in prayers,
left vespers early and pranced out of mass. The highly intelligent Soso also
led a rebellion against repressive teaching staff who were constantly trying
to catch him with banned radical books.
From the tyrannical priests he learnt exactly the tactics – “surveillance,
spying, invasion of inner life, violation of feelings”, in Stalin’s own
words – that he would recreate in his Soviet police state.
With his studies still incomplete, he left the seminary and rapidly became a
clandestine labour agitator, embracing the struggle against the autocratic
Tsar Nicholas II.
He was a devotee of Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik faction in the
main Russian antigovernment party, the Social Democrats. Immersed in the
honour and loyalty culture of Georgia, he saw himself as a gritty realist,
sarcastic cynic and the pitiless cutthroat par excellence.
By 1905, a year of upheaval in the tsarist empire, he was commanding armed
men, tasting power and embracing terror and gangsterism. It was then that he
discovered love.
DURING unrest in Tiflis he asked one of his followers, Alyosha Svanidze, to
find him somewhere safe to live. Where could be safer, Svanidze thought,
than the apartment behind the military headquarters in central Tiflis where
his three pretty sisters ran a French couture house, Atelier Hervieu, which
made uniforms and dresses for officers and their wives?
The sisters – Alexandra (Sashiko), Maria (Mariko) and Ekaterina (Kato) – were
from Racha in western Georgia, famous for its placid, loving beauties.
Sashiko was married but the others were single. Kato, the youngest, was a
curvaceous and “ravishingly pretty” brunette.
“Alyosha invited to stay in our place a fellow whom everyone considered the
leader of the Bolshevik faction,” Sashiko wrote in her memoirs. “He was
poorly dressed, thin, with an olive complexion, his face slightly
pockmarked, smaller than average: Soso Djugashvili.”
“Our place,” recalled her husband, Mikheil Monoselidze, a Bolshevik,
“was above the suspicion of the police.” The waiting room was usually full
of counts, generals and police officers – the ideal headquarters for an
underworld boss. Stalin held many of his gangster and terrorist meetings at
the atelier. He hid secret papers in the bodies of her fashion mannequins.
The young Stalin of this era was a man of many aliases, usually dressed in a
red satin shirt and grey coat. Sometimes he favoured a traditional Georgian
long tunic, and he liked to sport a white Caucasian hood, draped dashingly
over his shoulder. He frequently escaped manhunts by dressing in drag.
Although he cultivated the coarseness of a peasant, which concealed his subtle
gifts from snobbish rivals, he could also be charming and humorous. He had a
beautiful singing voice and he was an excellent poet. Yet he was profoundly
morose, an odd mix of Georgian warmth and northern coldness. His “burning”
eyes were honey-flecked when friendly, yellow when angry.
To entertain the Svanidze sisters and seamstresses, Stalin read socialist
pamphlets or novels, says Sashiko, “or he would tell jokes, play the fool or
tease”. When the girls’ parents were visiting, “Stalin sang a romantic song
with such powerful emotion that all were enchanted, even though they could
see he was rough and devoted to revolution”, recorded one of their cousins.
Kato was charmed. She and Stalin were falling for each other. “You can’t
imagine what beautiful dresses she used to make!” he later told a
girlfriend. In old age, he reminisced that she was goodhearted, beautiful
and devoted.
Politics intervened in the developing ménage. Nicholas II was facing a
political crisis in the wake of defeat by Japan and in 1905 he grudgingly
granted Russia’s first constitution, an elected parliament and a free press.
This concession triggered turbulence and savagery across the Russian empire,
which the Bolsheviks tried to turn into a revolution.
Armed workers controlled much of Tiflis, where Stalin organised the pillaging
of three military arsenals. The Svanidze sisters hosted a theatrical
fundraiser for radical causes.
Just as the revolution seemed on the verge of triumph, the tsar sent in
Cossack troops to crush dissent throughout the empire. They shot, looted,
burnt and hanged as they advanced through Georgia. When they massacred
students and workers in central Tiflis, Kato helped the wounded. Her
sisters, fearing she was dead, found her in a scene that resembled a minor
battlefield.
With the revolution defeated, Stalin gathered a gang of brigands known as the
Outfit to continue the struggle and provide funds for the exiled Lenin. They
engaged in arms procurement, prison escapes, bank robberies, protection
rackets and assassination. They even robbed a treasure ship on the Black
Sea.
The political glamour of the Outfit’s activities concealed psychotic
mafia-style brutality. Stalin ordered the execution of a comrade suspected
of pilfering. He also ran a network of little boys as spies.
He was on the run from the Okhrana, the tsarist secret police, and the
gendarmes, the political police. But he crept back for trysts with Kato at
the Atelier Hervieu. During one rendezvous, a gendarme lieutenant approached
with two manhunting German dogs. Soso jumped out of the back window – though
probably the gendarme was calling to order a new uniform.
AS HER sister’s memoirs make clear, Kato knew perfectly well that Stalin was
organising robberies. She worshipped him “like a demigod” but knew he was
devoted to the cause and had a rough temper.
Their love affair reached a new height when he came home from a Bolshevik
congress in Sweden. “It was hard to recognise him,” recalled Sashiko. “In
Stockholm, the comrades had made him buy a suit, a felt hat and a pipe so he
looked like a real European. It was the first time we saw him well dressed.”
Kato and Stalin “declared their feelings” to the family. He agreed to a church
wedding even though he was an atheist. They were married in the romantic
flickering of candlelight late on the night of July 15 1906. Stalin was
scruffy once more, recorded a friend, “and we all laughed throughout the
ceremony, especially Comrade Soso himself”.
The wedding supper was attended by two hitmen with whom Stalin was plotting
his biggest bank heist. There was no honeymoon, but the couple were in love.
“I was amazed how Soso, who was so severe in his work and to his comrades,
could be so tender, affectionate and attentive to his wife,” wrote Sashiko’s
husband. “All the time he was thinking how to please her . . . when he had
time . . . but when he was involved in his work he forgot everything.”
According to Ketevan Gelovani, an aged relative of the Svanidzes whom I
interviewed in Tbilisi, Soso behaved gently towards Kato except for flashes
of temper: “Soon after the wedding, he burnt her hand with a cigarette in a
fury, but she loved him and he was mostly so kind and tender to her.”
WITHIN weeks Kato would learn how hard it was to be married to a man whose
real wife and mistress was the revolution.
During a raid on a Bolshevik in Moscow, the Okhrana found a note that read:
“Freilinskaya Street, seamstress Svanidze, ask for Soso.” Soon afterwards
gendarmes raided the house. Stalin was away, but Kato was arrested. She was
four months pregnant.
Sashiko sprang into action, calling in the favours of her clients. “I went to
see the wife of Gendarme Colonel Rechitsky (whose dress I was making at the
time).” The colonel’s wife had Kato transferred from prison to a police
station. The police chief’s wife, another client, then took her home and
looked after her. She even let Stalin visit her there. “Fortunately none of
them knew Soso by sight,” said Monoselidze.
Soon after her release, Kato gave birth to a son, Yakov. Stalin was delighted.
“After the birth of the baby,” Monoselidze observed, “his love for wife and
child became 10 times more.”
He nicknamed the baby Patsana (Laddie). At home Stalin became “irritated when
the baby’s crying disturbed his work. But as soon as the mother fed it and
the baby stopped crying, he kissed him, tickling his nose, fondling him”.
He had much on his mind. He was planning a colossal robbery that would have
terrible consequences for their lives.
At 10.30am on the sultry morning of Wednesday, June 13 1907, Kato sunned
herself and the baby on her balcony unaware that her husband was about to
give her, and Tiflis itself, an unholy shock.
A stone’s throw away in seething Yerevan Square, 20 of his brigands –
including two pretty girls with Mauser pistols hidden in their dresses –
reached for their guns and grenades as two stagecoaches hurtled towards them
carrying treasure for Tiflis’s new state bank.
Days earlier, in Berlin and then in London, Lenin had secretly met Stalin to
order the heist, even though the Social Democratic party had just banned all
robberies.
The gunmen and the girls stepped forward and tossed grenades that exploded
under the carriages, disembowelling horses and tearing to pieces the
Cossacks and police escorting the treasure. Then they opened fire.
More than 10 bombs exploded. Screaming passers-by thought it was an
earthquake. By the next day the robbery was in British newspapers. Worth the
equivalent of about £1.7m today, the loot was smuggled abroad and laundered,
much of the proceeds going to Lenin.
During the ensuing century, Stalin’s role that day was suspected yet
unprovable. But now the archives in Moscow and Tbilisi show how he
masterminded the operation.
He felt safe enough to go home to Kato and boast of his exploit: his boys (and
girls) had done it. For a couple of days he drank insouciantly in Tiflis’s
riverside taverns, but not for long. He suddenly told his wife that they
were leaving to start a new life in Baku, the oil-boom city far away on the
Caspian Sea. They vanished from Tiflis two days later.
THE robbery and the tragic events of the next few months helped to transform
Stalin into the supreme politician for whom no challenge and no cost in
human life would be too great to realise his personal ambitions and his
utopian dreams.
He was banished from Tiflis and expelled from the Social Democratic party for
flouting its ban on robberies, but he had proved himself as a ruthless man
of action to the one patron who really counted. Lenin decided that Stalin
was “exactly the kind of person I need”.
Politically, Stalin never looked back. First, however, Kato’s fate was still
be played out.
In Baku – “the most dangerous place in Russia”, according to its own governor
– Stalin plunged once more into banditry, espionage, extortion and
agitation. He moved his little family into a “Tartar house with a low
ceiling”, just above a cave, on the seaside outside the city.
Kato, a born homemaker, made the shack cosy, with a wooden bed, curtains and
her little sewing machine in the corner. Visitors noticed the contrast
between the sordid exterior and the tidiness inside – but Soso was not often
there, and Kato did not know many people.
In August, while she was suffering grievously from the stifling, polluted
heat, he was away in Germany attending the congress of the second communist
international. When he returned, his work came first.
“Soso would go early in the morning and return late at night while Kato sat at
home with a tiny baby terrified that he would be arrested,” remembered
Monoselidze. “Bad diet, little sleep, the heat and stress weakened her and
she fell ill. Surrounded by strangers, she had no friends around her. Soso
was so busy he forgot his family.”
“Soso loved her so much,” recorded Giorgi Elisabedashvili, a boyhood friend
and Bolshevik who saw them in Baku. But “wife, child, friend were only okay
if they didn’t hinder his work and saw things his way. You had to know Soso
to understand his love. Soso regretted it and was angry at himself for
having married in such circumstances.”
News reached the Svanidzes that Kato “was very thin”. They invited her to
recuperate at home. “How can I leave Soso?” she replied.
The Svanidzes wrote to ask Stalin to bring her back. Kato begged him. She was
really ill, “but he kept postponing the trip until she became weak and
suddenly he realised he had to act immediately”, remembered Sashiko.
In October, Stalin was sufficiently alarmed to escort her back to Tiflis. But
the journey was debilitating. “It was too hot on the way and she drank bad
water at a station.”
Leaving her with her family, Stalin returned to Baku, but she deteriorated.
Already weak, exhausted and malnourished, she had contracted typhus. Mariam
Svanidze, a cousin still alive in Tbilisi aged 109 when I interviewed her in
2005, remembered that its speckled rash showed first red then darkened
ominously.
Kato lost blood and fluid in miserable spasms of dysentery. Stalin rushed back
from Baku to find her dying. He “nursed her desperately and tenderly,
suffering himself”, but it was too late.
Just weeks after her return, on November 22 1907, Kato “died in his arms”. She
was 22; they had been married for only 16 months.
Stalin closed Kato’s eyes himself. Stunned, he managed to stand beside his
wife’s body with the family for a photograph but then collapsed.
“Nobody could believe Soso was so wounded,” wrote Elisabedashvili. He sobbed
that “he couldn’t manage to make her happy”.
He was in such despair that his friends were worried about leaving him with
his Mauser. “I was so overcome with grief that my comrades took my gun away
from me,” he later told a girlfriend. “I realised how many things in life I
hadn’t appreciated. While my wife was alive, there were times I didn’t
return home at night. I told her when I left not to worry about me but when
I got home, she'd be sitting there. She’d wait up all night.”
The funeral was held at the church where they had married. Stalin, pale and
tearful, spoke to Josef Iremashvili, another childhood friend. “This
creature,” he gestured at the open coffin, “softened my heart of stone. She
died and with her died my last warm feelings for humanity.”
According to Iremashvili, he placed his hand over his heart: “It’s all so
desolate here, so indescribably desolate.”
At the burial, Stalin’s self-control cracked. He threw himself into the grave
with the coffin. After being hauled out, he noticed Okhrana agents sidling
into the graveyard. He vaulted over the fence, disappearing from his wife’s
funeral in a final act of marital negligence.
He did not return for his son. “Kato died,” wrote Monoselidze, “leaving
eight-month-old Laddie to us.”
Kato’s mother and the Monoselidzes raised the baby, whom Stalin barely
visited. The family were appalled.
Writing 30 years later during Stalin’s dictatorship, though before the Terror,
the Svanidzes courageously recorded their disapproval of his behaviour,
making it clear they continued to blame his neglect for Kato’s death.
At the time, they were among his most intimate courtiers. But their fortunes
were suddenly and terribly reversed. Kato’s sister Sashiko died of cancer;
otherwise she might have shared the fate of her other sister Mariko, her
brother Alyosha and his wife, Maria, in the Great Terror.
All were arrested on trumped up charges and executed. Stalin liked to excuse
the arrest of other leading families by saying: “What can I do? My own
family is in jail!”
As for Laddie, he moved into Stalin’s household as a young man but his slow
Georgian ways infuriated his father. When he bungled a suicide, more of a
cry for help, Stalin laughed that “he could not even shoot straight”.
Laddie married in the 1930s and had a daughter Galina, who is still alive.
During the second world war he was captured by the German invaders. His
father believed he had betrayed him and had his wife arrested. But Laddie
committed suicide without breaking. Afterwards, Stalin regretfully admitted
the boy had been “a real man”.
© Simon Sebag Montefiore 2007
Extracted from Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore, published by
Weidenfeld & Nicolson at £25. It is available for £22.50 including
postage from The Sunday Times Books-First on 0870 165 8585
