Simon Montefiore - Young Stalin

They were not meant to be in London at all: the original plan was to hold the Congress in Copenhagen, so Stalin travelled to St. Petersburg, then to Finland and on to Malmö in Sweden, whence he and his fellow delegates were ferried to Copenhagen. But the Danes expelled them to Sweden, which sent them back to Denmark, which despatched them to Esbjerg, where they caught a steamship to London.

The other big news during these weeks was a plot against the life of the Tsar and a photo-portrait of the three-year-old Tsarevich Alexei headlined: TSAREVICH WEARS HIS FIRST PAIR OF KNICKERS; the wedding of the Tsar’s cousin Grand Duke Nicholas to the daughter of the Prince of Montenegro; and the birth of a son to the English Queen of Spain, headlined AN ENGLISH BABE.

Now a furniture warehouse, a camera shop and a gentleman’s outfitters.

Later in life, Gorky would become the dictator’s friend, shameful apologist, pathetic trophy and possibly victim. See Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar .

Stalin slyly blamed this on Grigory Alexinsky in Notes of a Delegate , his account of the London Congress published under the name “Koba Ivanovich” in Bakinsky Proletary . He pointed out that the “majority of Mensheviks were Jews, then came Georgians and then Russians. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of the Bolshevik group were Russians, then came Jews (not counting Poles and Letts of course), then Georgians…” Much has been made of the Jewish nature of the SDs, but Stalin’s figures show how Georgian the Party was too. Arsenidze asserts that Stalin was “neutral” on the Jews, merely interested in what was useful politically. In his articles, he was sympathetic to their plight: “Groaning under the yoke are the eternally persecuted and humiliated Jews who lack even the miserably few rights enjoyed by other Russian subjects.” On a related theme, he also attacked the Mensheviks for being “intellectuals” instead of workers and expressed amazement that the Mensheviks had attacked the Bolsheviks for containing too many intellectuals: “We explained the Menshevik shouts by the proverb: ‘The tongue ever turns to the aching tooth.’” As we have seen, this was a favourite phrase. As for the challenge to his credentials, most histories retell this to diminish his importance and standing, but never mention that the respected Tskhakaya and Shaumian were challenged simultaneously. There was another reason for Lenin’s insouciance. He had offered a merger deal to the Georgian Mensheviks: if Jordania did not interfere in Russian matters, he could become leader of a united Party in Georgia. Jordania never took up the offer.

Churchill, aged thirty-three, was living at his bachelor flat at Mount Street WI while Stalin, twenty-nine, was staying as Koba Ivanovich in Stepney. Already Under-Secretary for the Colonies in the Liberal government of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, he had just published his biography of his father, Lord Randolph. He was famous enough for a biography of himself to be published, the first. While Stalin was in England, Churchill travelled up to give a speech in Scotland which was reported in the papers.

“Stalin in Wales” persists: the Welsh writer John Summers “confirmed” it on a visit to the mining town founded by a Welshman, Hughesovska (now Donetsk) in the Soviet Union in the 1970s. A Welsh website still lists Stalin among “scary individuals who have spent quality-time in Wales,” alongside the serial-killer Fred West, the magician Aleister Crowley, the Nazi Rudolf Hess and the Ugandan tyrant Idi Amin: “Stalin briefly visited the South Wales valleys to garner support and raise funds for the Russian Revolution.” Of Stalin’s helpers, Fyodor Rothstein, the Bolshevik fixer in London, became Soviet Ambassador to Persia, dying before the Terror. His son Andrew Rothstein enjoyed a strange career between the English Establishment and the Stalinist nomenklatura , he studied at Oxford University, then worked in the Marxism-Leninism Institute during the Terror and was fortunate to survive, later returning to London to become the sage of British Marxism. In one of his more bizarre reminiscences, Stalin told a group of British MPs during the Second World War that he had seen Benito Mussolini, then a socialist, at a Marxist meeting when he was in London. It is possible he did see Mussolini at some socialist conference in Germany, but the future Duce was not then in London. Stalin’s English errand-boy Bacon became a hospital orderly at Beckenham Hospital. He gave an interview to the Daily Express in 1950 when he was fifty-six. “I wonder if Generalissimo Stalin, Father of all the Russias, remembers the tall boy who bought him toffee,” concluded Bacon. The house on Jubilee Street no longer exists.

The Bolshevik position in Georgia was undermined by the assassination of the hugely popular Prince Ilya Chavchavadze, who had published Soso’s poems, in August 1907. The Bolsheviks had attacked his patriarchical version of Georgian culture and, it was widely believed, had decided to kill him; there is some evidence that Stalin’s friend Sergo Ordzhonikidze organized or took part in the assassination. It may be that the SDs played no role in the murder at all. Stalin always praised Chavchavadze’s poetry in his old age and there is no evidence that he ordered the hit, but he was very close to Sergo and he was certainly more than capable of separating literary merit from cruel necessity: politics always came first.

Stalin himself later implied he was in the Tamamshev Caravanserai and saw Tsintsadze give the gangsters their pep talk, but Tsintsadze had just been arrested. Perhaps the old dictator was muddling this bank robbery with another, that of 1912 (see Chapter 29). In 1907 Kamo was presumably the pep talker.

The other gangsters, who had actually conducted many more heists, were jealous of Kamo’s fame. “Our Outfit was called the Kamo Group,” says Bachua Kupriashvili, “but it wasn’t true. We accepted Kamo into the group over a year after it had been set up. He played his role in this big action after which everything was ascribed to him… But Kote Tsintsadze, Intskirveli, Eliso Lominadze… were not inferior and probably superior to Kamo.”

Lenin published an epistemological polemic, “Materialism and Empiricism,” which attacked Alexander Bogdanov’s mystical philosophical relativism, which he believed threatened Marxist materialism.

After Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin’s Bolshevik legitimacy became hugely important as he tried to prove himself worthy to become the heir. If Martov had proved Stalin’s expulsion, he might have saved Russia from Stalinism.

The Persian word for fire is azer —hence the name of the country, Azerbaijan.

They were soon joined by an Englishman, Sir Marcus Samuel, later Viscount Bearsted, founder of Shell. In 1912, Eduard de Rothschild, Alphonse’s son, sold most of the Rothschild interests in Baku to Royal Dutch Shell, then headed by Henri Deterding. The Rothschilds took most of their payment in Royal Dutch Shell shares. This proved a classically brilliant Rothschild deal. The Rothschilds eschewed oil investments in Russia for almost a century—making another fortune in the Russian oil boom of the twenty-first century. The ex-Rothschild palace is now Azerbaijan’s Justice Ministry.