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January 1, 2022 - March 31, 2023
Abusive, arbitrary behavior, and graft, rendered the police profoundly unpopular.
Peasant-born sergeants acted like petty tyrants toward villagers, boasting of their power, under the theory that the more severe they were, the greater would be their authority.
From Stockholm Jughashvili returned to the Caucasus in spring 1906. He wore a suit with a real hat, and carried a pipe, like a European. Only the pipe would last.
He had found a calling in punditry.
It also showed that in Marxism he had found his theory of everything.
Thus, in order to explain Marx’s concept of materialism (social existence determines consciousness), the future Stalin had rendered his father a victim of historical forces.
In the capital of world imperialism, the future Stalin also encountered Lev Bronstein (aka Trotsky), the high-profile former head of the 1905 Petrograd Soviet, but what impression the two might have made on each other remains undocumented.
No other evidence corroborates this story of Lenin’s possible sellout of Jughashvili, who had expended so much blood and sweat fighting for Bolshevism in the Caucasus.
Lenin often proposed or cut deals that he had no intention of honoring.
Britons invested one fourth of their country’s wealth overseas, financing the building of railroads, harbors, mines, you name it—all outside Europe.
by 1900, the British owned more than half of world shipping.
Reaching an accord with Britain seemed very much in the Russian interest, provided that such a step did not antagonize Germany.
In the aftershock of the defeat by Japan in 1905–6, Russia had undergone a vigorous internal debate about what was called foreign orientation (what we would call grand strategy).
A space had opened for a conservative reorientation away from democratic France toward an alliance based on “monarchical principle”—meaning a Russian alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary,
Arrayed against this, however, stood Russia’s Constitutional Democrats, Anglophiles who wanted to preserve the alliance with republican France and achieve rapprochement with liberal Britain in order to strengthen Russia’s Duma at home.
In August 1907, just two months after Stolypin’s constitutional coup d’etat introducing narrower voting rules for the Duma, he...
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This fiasco inadvertently reinforced the importance of Russia’s signing of the entente with Britain, which seemed to signal a firm geopolitical orientation and, correspondingly, the defeat of the conservatives and Germanophiles.
Both of Russia’s effective strategic choices—line up with France and Britain against Germany, or accept a junior partnership in a German-dominated Europe that risked the wrath of France and Britain—contained substantial peril.
After 1907, Britain carried no obligations toward Russia should the Japanese ramp up their aggressiveness, but Russia was on the hook should the Anglo-German antagonism heat up.
He noted that the congress had been dominated by Mensheviks, many of whom were Jews. “It wouldn’t hurt,” he wrote in the report, recalling another Bolshevik’s remarks at the congress, “for us Bolsheviks to organize a pogrom in the party.”
Thus, although the other non-Russian Bolsheviks also stood apart from the ethnic Russians to an extent, Jughashvili was a recognizable Asiatic.
suit. More enduringly, this circumstance may have motivated his 1907 abrupt abandonment of the Georgian language in favor of Russian in his punditry.
the Mensheviks argued that the combat-squad/expropriation strategy had failed to overturn the existing order. Instead, the Mensheviks wanted to emphasize cultural work (workers’ clubs and people’s universities) as well as standing for Duma elections.
Jughashvili’s Baku exploits included not just propagandizing and political organizing, but also hostage taking for ransom, protection rackets, piracy, and, perhaps, ordering a few assassinations of suspected provocateurs and turncoats.
That said, the majority of Caucasus revolutionary killings were the work not of Bolsheviks but of the Armenian Dashnaks.
Baku’s toxic environment, meanwhile, exacerbated his young wife Kato’s frailty and she died a frightful death in December 1907 from typhus or tuberculosis, hemorrhaging blood from her bowels.
As for his exhilarating revolutionary banditry, it was over, quickly. Already by March 1908, Jughashvili was back in a tsarist jail, in Baku, where he studied Esperanto—one fellow inmate recalled him “always with a book”—but
Nearly succumbing to a serious bout of typhus, Jughashvili romanced Tatyana Sukhova, another exile,
He was always something of a brooder, like his father Beso, and increasingly took to nursing perceived slights.
Jughashvili seems to have been prone to outbursts of anger, and many contemporaries found him enigmatic, although none (at the time) deemed him a sociopath.
Not long after his escape, on August 12, 1909, his father, Beso, died of cirrhosis of the liver. The funeral service was attended by a single fellow cobbler, who closed Beso’s eyes. The father of the future dictator was buried in an unmarked grave.
Soberly speaking, what did his life amount to? Nearly thirty-one years of age, he had no money, no permanent residence, and no profession other than punditry, which was illegal in the forms in which he practiced it. He had written some derivative Marxist journalism. He had learned the art of disguise and escape, whether in hackneyed fashion (female Muslim veil) or more inventive ways, and like an actor, he had tried on a number of personas and aliases—“Oddball Osip,” “Pockmarked Oska,” “the Priest,” “Koba.”132 Perhaps the best that could be said about Oddball, Pockmarked Oska, and Koba the
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Prison, exile, poverty: this had been his life since that day in March 1901 when he had had to flee the Tiflis Meteorological Observatory and go underground, and it would remain this way right through 1917.
But the okhranka had managed to put the revolutionary parties on a short leash, creating fake opposition groups to dilute them.
Sergei Kostrikov, aka Kirov, would later muse to the Leningrad party organization that he would oversee.
Social Democratic party strength, which had peaked at perhaps 150,000 empirewide in 1907, had fallen below 10,000 by 1910.
“The mistake we have been making for many decades,” Sergei Witte recorded in his diary in 1910, “is that we have still not admitted to ourselves that since the time of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great there has been no such thing as Russia: there has only been the Russian empire.”
In aiming for a single “Russian” nation defined in faith (Orthodoxy)—imagined to comprise Great Russians, Little Russians (Ukrainians), and White Russians (Belorussians)—the nationalists had imposed severe prohibitions against Ukrainian language and culture. Predictably, this only stoked Ukrainian national consciousness further—and in the guise of opposition, rather than loyalty.
It was the Russian nationalists, more than non-Russian nationalisms, who helped destabilize the Russian empire.
Stolypin’s turn to Orthodoxy as nationalism, after his reform efforts had stalled, testified to weakness and reconfirmed the lack of an effective political base for the regime. Bismarck had managed for more than two decades to wield control over the legislative agenda, despite the growing power of Germany’s middle and working classes and the absence of his own political party. Stolypin’s herculean efforts at forging Bismarck-like parliamentary coalitions without his own political party failed.
Whereas Alexander III would flatly state his faltering confidence to any given official, Nicholas II would say nothing but then secretly intrigue against the objects of his displeasure.
Nonetheless, the deeper patterns were systemic, not personal.
Nicholas II could not act as his own prime minister in part because he was not even part of the executive branch—the autocrat, by design, stood above all branches—while the Russian government he named, oddly, was never an instrument of his autocratic power, only a limitation on it.
But Stalin’s dabbling in banditry in 1907 in Tiflis had afforded him notoriety of a mostly negative sort, which he would have to work hard to suppress,
Still, thinning from a meager diet, hounded by surveillance, humiliated by surprise searches, the “Caucasian”—as the Vologda police called him—led a destitute existence.
That same September 1911, while Jughashvili was being rearrested in St. Petersburg, farther south, at the Kiev Opera House during a performance of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan, Mordekhai “Dmitry” Bogrov, a twenty-four-year-old lawyer and anarchic terrorist—in the clandestine pay of the okhranka—assassinated Stolypin.
In effect, the Bolshevik faction formally asserted a claim over the entire Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party.