Free Stalin and His Hangmen by Donald Rayfield

someone who was a Caliban impersonating Prospero). He described to Polina the paintings of the Louvre. After they parted she gave him the cross she wore, and Iosif, instead of a photograph of himself, sent her pictures of bare-breasted nymphs and half-undressedkissing couples. On his secret trip to Petersburg in August he used a passport in the name of her fiance who, although an exile, was not a wanted man.
The Okhranka now took a closer look at Koba: they decided at first not to rearrest him, but to use him as a tracer to lead them to other Bolsheviks. They let Koba reach St Petersburg, where Orjonikidze gave him a message from Lenin. In October 1911 he left again; this time, he hoped, for good. He was closely followed, arrested and so well interrogated that he gave, for almost the only time, his real date of birth. Even so, the Okhranka failed to translate the Georgian and German entries in Koba’s notebooks, and gave him a railway pass to Vologda and permission to live anywhere except St Petersburg and Moscow. The gendarmerie had so vague a description of Koba – omitting his pockmarks and crippled arm – that he could not easily be recaptured.
In Baku or Tbilisi such leniency indicated corruption. Administrative sanctions against revolutionaries were determined at the highest level – by the minister of the interior, even the Tsar – but on the basis of reports compiled by lowly captains or majors. The gendarmes and prison warders in the provinces had their tariff, from fifty roubles for letting someone impersonate a prisoner, to 800 roubles for sending the prisoner to a tolerable part of European Russia, not Siberia. In Petersburg, however, such laxity occurred for serious reasons: either the Okhranka had made its prisoner a police informer or the Okhranka wanted other revolutionaries to suspect that its prisoner was an informer.
There were even more sophisticated motives: at the Ministry of the Interior, the head of police Sergei Zubatov was infiltrating the Social Democrat and Social Revolutionary movements. Merely to bribe or blackmail revolutionaries into being police informers was futile; an effective informer such as Roman Malinovsky – soon to be a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee and the leader of the Social Democrat faction in the Duma – would be either found out or paralysed every time his information was acted on. More Mephistophelean were plans to encourage, even subsidize, extreme and fractious revolutionaries to splinter the left into feuding factions.
If Koba collaborated with the Okhranka, this is a tribute to his equally Mephistophelean recognition of the common interests that bound the Tsar’s Ministry of the Interior with the Social Democrat movement.Certain murders – of the Georgian Christian liberal writer and politician Prince (now Saint) Ilia Chavchavadze in 1907, of Russian Prime Minister Piotr Stolypin in 1911 – were the joint work of the establishment’s right wing and the revolution’s left wing, united against the parliamentary liberals who thwarted them both. Arrests and exiles of Social Democrats still took place, but only if the revolutionaries were no use to the police as informers or allies.
Koba stayed in Vologda until February 1912, cementing his relationship with Viacheslav Molotov in St Petersburg by an exchange of letters. He closeted himself studying German verbs. He missed the Prague party conference, but wrote a letter which showed, as Krupskaia expostulated, that, ‘He is terribly cut off from everything as if he has come from another planet.’ In February 1912 Koba left for Moscow, his every move reported to the police by agents, among them Roman Malinovsky whom Koba treated as a bosom friend. In Petersburg Koba learnt that the Prague conference had co-opted him onto the Central Committee and made him, with Elena Stasova, Orjonikidze and Malinovsky, a member of the Russian Bureau that would implement within the country decisions taken abroad.
In April