Free Stalin and His Hangmen by Donald Rayfield Page B

judgement in choosing, not whom to flatter or court, but whom to appoint, whom to dismiss. But long before the revolution, by 1913, he had met most of those who would play a part in his rise to power – whom he would follow, patronize or kill. Of those he would need most, he had got to know Mikhail Kalinin, his puppet head of state, in 1900 and Emelian Iaroslavsky, his most effective propagandist, in 1905. In 1906 Stalin met Dzierżyński, who would swing Lenin’s secret police behind him, and Klim Voroshilov, who would subordinate the army to Stalin’s will and then supervise the slaughter of every possible dissident senior officer. In 1907 he acquired a loyal ally in Sergo Orjonikidze, and in 1908 the unprincipled lawyer Vyshinsky, who would organize the parody of legal process by which terror could be instituted. In 1910 Stalin won over the most devoted of his subordinates, Viacheslav Molotov. Lazar Kaganovich was the only figure close to Stalin during the revolution whom he had not met in the revolutionary underground.
Likewise, by 1913 Stalin had met, and taken a dislike to, the party’s theoreticians, the rivals whom he would exterminate. He met Kamenev in 1904, Rykov in 1906, Trotsky and Zinoviev in 1912, and Bukharin in 1913. They would pay for their condescension to Koba decades later.
Trotsky disliked Stalin at first sight: ‘The door was flung open, without a preliminary knock, an unknown person appeared on the threshold – squat, with swarthy face and traces of smallpox.’ Koba poured himself tea and without a word walked out. Bukharin, a daily visitor to the apartment where Koba stayed, reacted to him with a mix of admiration, affection, fear and horror. To judge from Koba’s letters intercepted by the Russian secret service, he felt unhappy in the bourgeois luxury of Vienna and, despite Lenin’s admiration, Russian intellectuals in exile irritated him. ‘There’s nobody to let my hair down with. Nobody to have a heart-to-heart,’ he complained to an unknown girlfriend. Koba’s recent encounter with three persons in Lenin’s entourage – Zinoviev, Trotsky and Bukharin – was a blow to his self-esteem which gave him no peace until he had killed all three.
Nineteen thirteen, the year the Romanov dynasty celebrated its threehundredth anniversary, seemed to doom Koba to ignominy and obscurity. He fell into a depression that lasted four years. First, Malinovsky was denounced as a police agent in a calculated blow to the left wing by Vladimir Dzhunkovsky the head of the gendarmerie. Lenin would not believe it. The Bolsheviks now looked like a farcical band of deluded intellectuals, its Central Committee a handful of Okhranka puppets. Second, the police rounded up virtually every important Bolshevik activist at large in Russia. Third, the Romanov tercentenary, Russia’s economic boom and liberal legislation had dulled the proletarian grievances which fuelled Bolshevik popularity. Fourth, as Europe headed for war, as in Germany so in Russia the Social Democrats collapsed as an internationalist party: its members put nation first and socialism second. The revolution was indefinitely postponed.
Koba wrote to the Bolsheviks in exile abroad to complain of the Bacchanalia of arrests and hinted to Lenin that Malinovsky was putting a spanner in the works and was a police spy. In February first Iakov Sverdlov (who would be first head of the Soviet state) then Koba was arrested. This time it was decided not just to make Koba finish his exile but to pack him off for four years to furthest Siberia, to Turukhansk on the river Enisei where it crosses the Arctic Circle.
Despondent despite money offered by the party, Koba made no escape attempt, although he now signed himself K. (for Koba) Stalin (man of steel). 26 From Turukhansk, Koba was sent still further north to the tiny settlement of Miroedikha. Here Koba’s behaviour made him hated. The exile who had preceded him, Iosif Dubrovinsky, had drowned in the river