The Times Great Lives. Anna Temkin

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СКАЧАТЬ no hesitation in recommending him for a scholarship at the seminary in Tiflis following upon his matriculation there in the autumn of 1894.

      ‘A Model Pupil’; Clandestine Socialist

      In his early period at the seminary Dzhugashvili was a model pupil, able and diligent at his work, but towards the end of his first year, unbeknown to his tutors, he was already in contact with opposition groups in Tiflis and published some patriotic radical verses in the Liberal newspaper Iberya. His contact with radical groups in Tiflis, headed by former seminarists, continued to develop until finally in August, 1898, he joined the clandestine Socialist organization known as Mesamé-Dasi. Thenceforward he began to lead a kind of dual existence. His few leisure hours were spent in lecturing on Socialism to small groups of working men in Tiflis; discussion in a secret debating society, formed by himself inside the seminary, and the reading of radical books. This state of affairs eventually came to the notice of the seminary authorities and in May, 1899, the 20-year-old Dzhugashvili was expelled. He then embarked on a revolutionary career, but was faced with the immediate problem of employment. For a few months he made a little money giving lessons to the children of middle-class families and at the end of 1899 found a job as a clerk in the observatory at Tiflis – an occupation which seems to have afforded him much free time for political activity. He remained in this employment until March, 1901, when his political activities forced him to go underground completely.

      In November, 1901, he was elected to membership of the Social Democratic committee of Tiflis and a few weeks later was sent to Batum, where he proceeded with the establishment of a vigorous clandestine organization and an illegal printing press. The influence of this organization, under his leadership, on the oil workers of Batum was so remarkable in its manifestations that ‘Koba’ (as Dzhugashvili was then known) was arrested, and imprisoned in the spring of 1902 as a dangerous agitator. From his exile in Siberia he escaped a few weeks later and reappeared in Tiflis to find that the great schism which divided the Social Democratic Party in 1903 had left the Mensheviks in virtual control of the Caucasian party. A few months after his return, with some hesitation, Koba took the side of Lenin and the Bolsheviks and proceeded to agitate energetically against the Mensheviks and other political groupings.

      First Meeting with Lenin

      Koba’s role during the ‘general rehearsal’ of 1905 was a local rather than a national one. Apart from organizing the ‘fighting squads’ (later to be a subject of considerable controversy within the party) and the editing of the newspaper Kavkaski Rabochi Listok (Caucasian Workers’ News-sheet), which enjoyed temporary legality, he continued to conduct a vigorous onslaught against the Mensheviks. When he attended the party conference in Tammerfors in December, 1905, as a delegate of the Caucasian Bolsheviks (a group of uncertain credentials, since most of the local leaders were Mensheviks), Koba emerged for the first time from the provincial arena of Caucasian politics into the atmosphere of a truly national gathering. Here, too, he first met Lenin. In the following year he attended the Stockholm Congress and in 1907 the London Party Congress as a Caucasian delegate, where he encountered Trotsky.

      Soon after his return from the London Congress he was elected to membership of the Baku Committee, and it was in the oil wells of Baku that Stalin, on his testimony, first learned to lead great masses of workers. He was arrested in November, 1908, and deported to Vologda province. A few months later, however, he escaped and appeared again in the south, under the name of Melikyants. His period of freedom was brief, for he was re-arrested in March, 1910, and sent back to Vologda to complete his sentence of 1908. Released in June, 1911, he settled in Petersburg at the home of his future father-in-law, Alliluyev, although he had been forbidden to live in most large towns. In consequence, he was again arrested. Reaction was now at its height and the party fortunes at their lowest ebb. A small conference of Bolshevik stalwarts in Prague in January, 1912, coopted Stalin as a member of the central executive committee of the party; and on his escape a few weeks later he helped to found the new party journal Pravda in Petersburg.

      A Turning-point

      Lenin’s ‘Wonderful Georgian’

      It was in the winter of 1912-13 that Stalin made his only extended visit abroad, spending some months with Lenin in Cracow and some time in Vienna. This was a turning-point in his career. Ten years earlier Lenin, in his famous pamphlet ‘What is to be Done?’ had first stated the case, on which he never ceased to insist, for a centrally directed party of professional revolutionaries, organized and disciplined in thought and deed, as the essential instrument of social revolution. Stalin had all the marks of Lenin’s ideal professional revolutionary: he was intrepid, orderly and orthodox. It was a further asset that though born a Georgian and a member of one of the ‘subject races’ Stalin had had no truck with separatist or ‘federalist’ ideas within the party and was an out-and-out ‘centralist’. Not for nothing therefore did Lenin at this time refer to Stalin in a letter to Maxim Gorky as ‘a wonderful Georgian’ who was writing an essay on the national question. The essay, eventually published under the title ‘Marxism and the National Question’ in a party journal, was an attack on the ‘national’ heresies of the Austrian Marxists Bauer and Renner and a statement of accepted Bolshevik doctrine, steering a cautious middle course between those who regarded any kind of nationalism as incompatible with international socialism and those who regarded nationalism as an essential element in it. It was the first of his writings to be signed by the name under which he was to become famous.

      Back in Russia, Stalin underwent in February, 1913, his sixth and last imprisonment and exile. The revolution of February, 1917, released him, and he was probably the first member of the central committee of the party to reach Petersburg. In this capacity he temporarily took over the editorship of Pravda. This was the occasion of a short-lived deviation to which Stalin afterwards frankly confessed. In common with the other leading Bolsheviks then in the capital – excluding Molotov and Shlyapnikov – Stalin believed that the right tactics for the Bolsheviks were to support the provisional Government and rally to the defence of the fatherland; and this line, which would have assimilated the policy of the Bolsheviks to that of the Social-Democratic parties of the Second International, was taken editorially in Pravda. Lenin, chafing inactively in Switzerland, denounced in his ‘Letters from Afar’ the weak-kneed Bolsheviks of the capital. When later he reached Petrograd in the sealed train and propounded his famous ‘April theses’ of no cooperation with the provisional Government or with any policy that would keep Russia in the war, he quickly rallied his faltering party, and geared it for the second revolution. Thereafter Stalin remained a faithful and undeviating disciple.

      1917 Revolution

      Enhanced Status in the Party

      The difficulty for the biographer of this as of the earlier period of Stalin’s life is to disentangle the authentic contemporary evidence from the mass of more recent and largely apocryphal accretions. It seems that he first became a figure familiar to party cadres at the time of his election to a new central committee of nine members in April, 1917, and after the difficult July days, when Lenin and Zinoviev were compelled to retreat to Finland and Kamenev, Trotsky and others were arrested, Stalin emerged to lead the party. On their return to the political scene, he retired again into the shadows. While there is but little information relating to any participation by him in the work of the Revolutionary Military Committee during the actual rising, he nevertheless undoubtedly performed an important function in the editorial office of Pravda. He supported Lenin against Zinoviev and Kamenev in the controversy over the preparation and timing of the October revolution and against Trotsky over Brest-Litovsk; and though his interventions recorded in the minutes of the central committee were on both occasions brief and inconspicuous, his fidelity to Lenin in these troubled times must have won the gratitude of the leader and greatly enhanced his status in the party. He was appointed People’s Commissar for Nationalities in October, 1917, and in this capacity one of his first measures was to proclaim Finland’s independence from Russia, at a conference in Helsinki. In spite of the opposition of elements within the party, who regarded this as an unwarranted СКАЧАТЬ