Stalin and His Hangmen by Donald Rayfield

Enisei that May. Stalin violated revolutionary etiquette by appropriating Dubrovinsky’s library. He was transferred ninety miles south to the village of Kostino, and then north again to a hamlet, Monastyrskoe. Koba was, one guesses, more miserable than ever before or afterwards. From here he wrote to Zinoviev asking for books. He asked a woman friend to send his underwear. He wrote to, of all people, Roman Malinovsky, asking for sixty roubles, complaining of poverty – no bread, meat or paraffin in an area where the only food an exile could have for free was fish – of emaciation and an ominous cough. Then, on 27 September 1913, he moved in with Iakov Sverdlov ten miles away. Money arrived, but it was meant only for Sverdlov’s escape. The gendarmerie, who read all letters, deducted the money from Stalin’sand Sverdlov’s board allowances and deported them, with a gendarme, Laletin, a hundred miles further north to an even more desolate outpost, Kureika. Again Stalin begged Malinovsky for money, as if he did not know that Malinovsky had resigned after being exposed as a spy.
Sverdlov found Stalin bad company. He wrote to his wife: ‘…you know my dear what foul conditions I lived in at Kureika. The comrade [Stalin] we were with turned out on a personal level to be such that we didn’t speak or see each other.’ By Easter 1914, Stalin had forced Sverdlov out and moved in with a family of seven orphans, the Pereprygins. He scandalized both Sverdlov and Ivan Laletin by seducing the thirteen-year-old Lidia Pereprygina. Bolsheviks had tolerant sexual mores, but sleeping with a pubescent girl was for them typical of the hated feudal gentry. Koba was now beyond the pale. Laletin caught Stalin in flagrante and had to fight off Koba’s fists with his sabre. (Stalin then promised to marry Lidia Pereprygina when she came of age.) At Stalin’s insistence, the Turukhansk chief of police, the Osetian Ivan Kibirov, replaced the indignant Laletin – who nearly drowned on his return upriver – with a more compliant gendarme. 27 Lidia became pregnant; in 1916, after the baby died, she conceived again. 28
Cohabitation with an adolescent girl gave Stalin no joy. He read, he tried to master languages. He wrote very little – to Zinoviev to ask for English newspapers, to the Alliluevs to ask for postcards with pictures of pleasant scenery. He made one visit 120 miles upstream to Monastyrskoe, where his Armenian friend, Suren Spandaryan, now dying of TB, had been transferred. When the ice melted in spring 1915, five Bolshevik Duma deputies, all ‘anti-patriotic defeatists’, arrived, exiled to Monastyrskoe, and with them one familiar face from Tbilisi, Lev Kamenev. Here the exiles conferred, but Stalin could never endure more than a day or two of these gatherings, even though the news of Russia’s catastrophic defeats by the Germans must have rekindled hopes of revolution. Dispossessed radicals, cut off from their ideological leaders by war and by seven thousand miles of Asia and Europe, seemed to Koba ‘a little bit like wet chickens. Ha, there’s “eagles” for you.’ 29
The company soon dispersed: the Duma deputies and Kamenev were allowed south to the town of Eniseisk. The remaining exiles were demoralized and began to accuse each other of crimes: Sverdlov had been teaching a policeman German; Spandaryan had helped loot thelocal stores. Stalin voted that Sverdlov be ostracized. Another exile was beaten up; after the brawl Spandaryan had a haemorrhage which led to his death in September, despite the Tsar freeing him on compassionate grounds. Nobody saw Stalin in his last months in Siberia; perhaps he fled to Eniseisk, from hostility towards him at Kureika when Lidia Pereprygina became pregnant again.
By autumn 1916 the Russian army’s losses in the war were so horrendous that the authorities began calling up political exiles: even Stalin, aged thirty-seven and with a withered arm, was summoned to the recruiting office in