Free Stalin and His Hangmen by Donald Rayfield Page A

1912, Koba was instrumental in setting up the Bolsheviks’ legal newspaper, Pravda, in St Petersburg. In May Molotov took over as editor, so that even in Stalin’s absence the paper would remain Stalinist.
The authorities, informed about the Prague congress, rounded up all the Central Committee members on Russian territory, with the exception of their own spy Malinovsky and, for show, Grigori Petrovsky. 23 The Bolshevik fraction suddenly became a party in exile. This time the security services worked professionally: Koba was properly described and a dossier of over 1,000 pages (the charge sheet amounted to sixty pages) was compiled. 24 The sentence was not, however, harsh. Koba was exiled to Narym, a village of a few hundred persons on the river Ob in Siberia, north of the railhead in Tomsk. Ernest Ozolins, a Latvian socialist, accompanied Stalin and other political prisoners on the very uncomfortable train journey. To Ozolins, Stalin stood out with his mocking, ironical sense of superiority, his aggressiveness and self-confidence. 25 In September 1912, after a few months languishing, Koba took a boat and, near Tomsk, found a friendly railwayman to smuggle him onto a passenger train back to Europe.
The authorities took two months to put him on the wanted list. By then, Koba was organizing the Bolshevik campaign for the fourth Duma elections. Koba made his way to the Caucasus, probably to help Kamo Ter-Petrosiants stage a mail robbery. By October he was back in Petersburg, where he helped ensure the Okhranka’s coup: their spy Roman Malinovsky was elected to the Duma to represent both Bolsheviks and the secret police. Soon Malinovsky had reported Koba’s arrival and both were on their way to Kraków to see Lenin. Here Koba met one more key associate: Grigori Zinoviev, a dairy farmer’s son who had spent most of the last decade in Switzerland, studying and lecturing in socialist politics.
No sooner had Malinovsky and Koba recrossed the Austrian-Russian frontier to get to St Petersburg for the opening of the Duma, than Lenin, Zinoviev and Krupskaia, sensing a trap, urgently called Koba back: ‘Rush him out as soon as possible, otherwise we can’t save him and he’s needed and has already done the essentials.’ Stalin nevertheless returned to Russia and there was no reason to panic. Malinovsky, now Bolshevik spokesman in the Duma, had taken such a soft line that many of his colleagues began to believe he was a police agent.
At the Duma’s Christmas break, Koba left for Kraków via Finland and Germany – his longest and his last journey abroad for thirty years. He stayed in apartments in Kraków and Vienna. His energy pleased Lenin – ‘the wondrous Georgian writing an article on the nationalities question’ wrote his first substantial treatise, ‘Marxism and the Nationality Question’, laboriously ploughing through German sources. Koba thus gained enough status as a Marxist theoretician to ensure that he would be minister for nationalities in the first Soviet government. On this journey he made two more acquaintances, Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin.
By 1913 he had made an impression, positive or negative, on virtually everyone who would participate in the October 1917 revolution. Above all, like Dzierżyński, he had won Lenin’s trust: here was a comrade who could and would do anything the party asked and, unlike Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev or Bukharin, would not argue policy, tactics or morals but would stay contentedly in the background. The secret of Stalin’s charm was that the deeper their acquaintance with him, the more his admirers wondered at the mixture of ruthless activity and well-hidden intellect. He still struck them as a coarse, monoglot barbarian, but theywould at some point be stunned by his mastery of information, human character and his ability to orientate himself in any group.
Another ten years would pass before Stalin, as general secretary of the Communist Party, could exercise his own