Revolutions - 10.44- Bolshevik Bank Heist

Episode Date: February 21, 2021

Who expropriates the expropriators? sponsor: harrys.com/revolutions

Hello and welcome to Revolutions. Episode 10.44 Bolshevik Bank Heist. Hello, I'm back again. This time, really back, really back for good. We closed out the last episode with Stalipan's coup in June 1907, which means we have officially entered the liminal space between the Revolution of 1905 and the Revolution of 1917. These years were defined by revolutionary retreat and reactionary retrenchment. So we're going to work through this period with everybody, with the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks and the SRs and the liberal cadets,

also Stalipin and the newly, quote unquote, reformed Duma's, the Romanovs, Nicholas and Alexandra, and their new BFF, Rasputin. That way we will have a good handle on where everybody was at physically and mentally and emotionally heading into the Revolution of 1917. Today, though, we are going to connect with our old friends in the R-S-D-L-P, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, and hopefully have a fun little episode focusing on one particularly fun little episode, the Tiflis Bank robbery,

a robbery that made headlines worldwide and helped carry the Bolshevik-Menshevik divide right to the breaking point. and it was masterminded by a Georgian Bolshevik running a small cadre of armed revolutionaries in the Caucasus who was born with the name, okay, I'm not even going to try to pronounce that, but he was known principally by a variety of aliases. He was called Soso, as in the famous Soso. He was called Coba as in Comrade Coba, but we all know him today as Joseph Stalin. Now, since the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks at the Second Party Congress back in 1903, the members of the RSDLP had been operating in a space somewhere between separation and divorce. The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks argued and disagreed about everything, but they argued with each other to win the debate and impose their vision on a unified party.

Neither yet wanted a formal divorce. Now, we'll talk about this even more next week, but for the purposes of today's episode, I am going to touch on two issues in particular. The first has nothing at all to do with today's episode and everything to do with cleaning up a mess I made in the last episode. Because when I was talking about the differences between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks about their attitude towards the second Duma, with the Mensheviks supporting running candidates in the next elections, while the Bolsheviks favored boycotting those elections. That is all true.

But I took that Bolshevik position, summarized it, paraphrased it, and then put it in Lenin's voice because Lenin was the leader of the Bolsheviks. But the thing is, that was not actually Lenin's position. Lenin was not actually supporting a boycott. An alert listeners, Alex and Philippe, both wrote me to say correctly that I mischaracterized Lenin's position and provided, among other things, an article Lenin wrote in August 1906 called The Boycott, making it clear that Lenin personally was not in favor of continuing the boycott despite the prevailing opinion of his fellow Bolsheviks. Lenin was an extremely practical guy and willing to embrace whatever tactics and strategies best fit the moment,

legal or illegal, armed, or peaceful. In the summer of 1906, after the dissolution of the first Duma and the failure of various military mutinies and strikes to co-eastern, a less into a renewal of a mass uprising-style revolution, Lenin concluded the party had to engage with the Duma because it was the best available arena for them to fight in, and they simply didn't have the force or power necessary to make a boycott count for anything. Both Lenin and Trotsky would later say that boycotting elections to a bourgeois parliament is only smart when you have a mass movement uprising ready to swamp that bourgeois parliament and replace it, which they did not

have at the moment. So Lenin argued, and I'm quoting him directly now, the dissolution of the Duma has now clearly demonstrated that in the conditions prevailing in the spring of 1906, the boycott, on the whole, was the right tactic and advantageous. But then he goes on to say, the time has now come when the revolutionary social Democrats must cease to be boycottists. We shall not refuse to go win to the second Duma, when or if it is convened. We shall not refuse to utilize this arena, but we shall not exaggerate its modest importance. On the contrary, guided by the experience already provided by history, we shall entirely subordinate the struggle we wage in the Duma to another form of struggle,

namely strikes, uprisings, etc. So that's Lennon in August of 1906, making his position perfectly clear. he believed some conditions pointed to a strategy of boycott, others to a strategy of not boycott, and heading into the elections for the second Duma, Lenin's position was they should not boycott the election. So apologies to Lenin and apologies to all of you for that mistake, and thank you to Alex and Philippe for correcting me. The other issue we need to talk about today very much pertains to today's episode, and that is the issue of expropriation. expropriation, as I said last time, is a fancy word for bank robberies.

Mensheviks, like Martov, Placanov, and Axelrod, opposed expropriations as little more than lawless banditry that was unbecoming and counterproductive. They believed that with Russia headed towards legal politics, that they needed to leave all of that violent, illegal criminality behind, for PR reasons, sure, but also because armed, armed gangs tended to be full of mere gangsters working for themselves, not the revolution, and they also happened to be easy points of access for government spies and agents provocateur, hoping to lead the party to ruin and discredit. Lennon, for the moment, emphatically disagreed with this.

He, as I said, was a practical man, and the party needed money to survive. During the revolutionary upswing of 1904 and 1905, the RSDLP, the RSDLP, had gotten a lot of donations and funding from liberal magnates and businessmen because they were all kind of on the same side fighting Tsarist autocracy. Those wealthy and ambitious businessmen saw the socialist revolutionaries as providing useful pressure in their own fight for political power. But now that the October manifesto had been proclaimed, and there were duma's and elections and everything,

that funding dried up. And Lenin did not think that. party could afford to turn its back on expropriation. So despite Menshevik opposition, and that means formal party opposition, because the Mensheviks won control of the Central Committee of the Party at the Fourth Party Congress in April 1906, Lenin and a group of senior Bolsheviks just kept on doing their own thing through a not-officially acknowledged group called Bolshevik Center. And it was not officially acknowledged because there were party rules banning such independent committees. Based in Finland,

Bolshevik center included Lenin himself, and also the number two Bolshevik, a guy named Alexander Bogdanov, who would soon challenge Lenin for control of the Bolshevik faction, and then probably the third most prominent Bolshevik, Leonid Krasen, an engineering genius living a double life. By day, Krasen was a prosperous and well-connected engineer working for various industrial enterprises, by night he was a committed Bolshevik revolutionary, whose principal obsession and occupation was bomb-making. And just to highlight the kind of underground cooperation that often went on between all the revolutionary groups, despite their doctrinal differences, the bombs used by the SR terrorists to try to kill Stalepin in the summer of

2006 were manufactured and given to them by Krasn. So despite the Menshevik opposition, Bolshevik Bolshevik Center just kept right on approving and organizing robberies and other criminal fundraising activities under the banner of expropriation. And they had some really good groups out there, loyal and reliable, doing excellent work providing the party desperately needed funds. This was true, especially down in Georgia. Now, socialists and Marxists down in the caucuses were mostly Mensheviks, but there was one highly capable Bolshevik group called the outfit, performing splendid revolutionary service. The leader of the outfit was the famous Soso, Conrad Coba, and much, much later, Joseph Stalin.

So, let's talk about Stalin. First of all, just to make this easy on all of us, I'm just going to refer to him from here on out as Stalin, even though that is not the name he was known for during this period. He did not adopt the name Stalin until at least 1912. But just to keep things simple, let's call him Stalin. And then also most everything that follows here in today's episode comes from either Young Stalin by Simon Seabag Montefuri or Volume 1 of Stephen Cockking's very extensive Stalin biographies in case you're interested in more about the adventures of young Stalin. Stalin was born in 1878 in the Tafleese government of Georgia, in an ethnically diverse community of mostly Georgians, Armenians, and Jews, Orthodox Christians and Turkish Muslims.

His father was a cobbler at the time of Stalin's birth, and he owned a shop supplying the local army garrison. But business suffered, and he was an occasionally violent alcoholic, so Stalin's mother left him in 1883, and then spent the next decade bouncing around various homes and occupations in and out of contact with her estranged husband. Stalin's first stable schooling was at a church school in 1888, where he displayed two permanent features of his personality.

He was very smart, intelligent, and he was interested in theater and poetry, but he was also recklessly rebellious, defiant, and got into a lot of fights. In 1894, at the age of 15, his mother secured him a spot at a seminary in Tiflees, the capital city of Georgia, which was an even more cosmopolitan city. And just to be clear about this, we don't call it Tiflease anymore. or it's Tabalisi, the capital of Georgia. At first, Stalin excelled academically and seemed to be on track to become a priest. But his rebellious defiance got the better of him.

He joined underground reading circles and fell in with teenage student radicals. So even though he read a lot, including Shernishovsky and Marx, they were the wrong books if you want to become an Orthodox priest, which Stalin didn't really want to do anymore because, among other, things he's now an atheist. So he stopped applying himself as a student. He stayed in seminary until 1890 when, at the age of 21, he either quit or was expelled. It's not entirely clear what the circumstances were, whether it was over unpaid tuition or some other new infraction piled on top of all his other old infractions. But whatever it was, in 1890, Stalin was all

done seminary and all done formal education. After leaving seminary. He got a steady job working at the Tifleese Meteorological Observatory doing some mundane tasks, but he was mostly interested in the underground branch of the recently formed Russian Social Democratic Labor Party he just joined. He was now educated enough on radical politics and Marxist economics that he was teaching others as much as he was teaching himself. But he never did stop teaching himself, and Stalin is mostly a self-taught revolutionary. Over the next two years, he participated in demonstrations, strikes, and Mayday events, including the storming of a prison to protest the arrest of strike organizers that left 13 dead.

In March 1903, he was finally arrested and tossed in prison himself. He spent a stint in solitary confinement, but then in late 1903 was sent into administrative exile in Siberia. but he did not stay there very long. He tried to escape once, but turned back after nearly freezing to death, and then escaped a second time, this time for good, and made it successfully back to Taflis in January 1904. His surprisingly easy escape, coupled with his growing militancy and constant proposals for daring action,

led several of his comrades to whisper that Stalin was now an Ahana agent provocateur. But that was not true. Siberia, as we know, leaked like a sieve, and Stalin was just Stalin. He was all dash, bravado, and militancy. When he got back, the RSDLP had split in two, and Stalin's attitude and comportment, that is, he was an absolutely committed full-time revolutionary, led him to align with Lenin and the Bolsheviks. And Stalin is one of those loyal agents that Lenin and Krupskaya cultivated after the split with the Mensheviks. So from here on out, Stalin no longer has a day job. He's a full-time revolutionary. He couch-surfed among friends and comrades, dressed shabbily, and was devoted to the revolution morning, noon, and night.

But he was also one of only a handful of Bolsheviks in Georgia. Most of the region's socialists went to the Mensheviks. When the Revolution of 1905 broke out, it first hit Georgia by way of a bloody ethnic conflict between Armenians and Azeri Turks, the so-called Tartars, who embarked on mutual massacres in February 1905 that left something like 2,000 people dead. Stalin and other socialist groups formed armed brigades mostly to try to keep the two groups separate because it was a drag on the revolutionary effort against the Tsar, and they suspected that the authorities encouraged and fomented all of this ethnic conflict for just that

very reason. Stalin spent the spring of 1905 fighting a losing battle against the Mensheviks for control of the various socialist groups in the region, and did not find a home base until he landed in the mining colony of Chiatura. There, 3,000 truly oppressed workers labored under terrible conditions producing about half the world's magnesium. Chiatura became a Bolshevik stronghold, as Stalin armed a motley array of workers and gangsters and revolutionary partisans. This is also when he first started regularly working with a woman named Patia Goldava, a young revolutionary who would be with him for the next several years. Chiatura was used as a base for guerrilla attacks and spreading propaganda,

but Stalin also ran a protection racket over the local mines and businesses to quote-unquote protect them as long as Stalin got paid. Now, since many of the owners were themselves opposed to the Tsar's authority, both over their businesses and the region generally, Stalin didn't have to press too hard for these payoffs. They willingly gave him money, and he even stayed in the homes of some of the biggest industrialists in Chaturra while waging his revolution. So also joining Stalin's group was an old friend who wound up kicked out of the same seminary as Stalin in 1901. Now, his name, too, is also a mess to pronounce, but luckily everybody came to call him Camo. Camo is not an intellectual revolutionary. He is usually described as a credulous simpleton who could not learn Russian nor Marxism, despite Stalin's efforts to tutor him. After being expelled from the seminary in 1901, he joined Stalin's underground group

and served as an enforcer, a robber, and a hatchet man. As he gained experience, Camo also became the principal trainer of new recruits. He also discovered he had a flare-for disguise, and he enjoyed brazenly passing unnoticed on smuggling runs or intelligence missions. He was also violent and utterly devoted and loyal to Stalin and the revolutionary cause, and he was far more inclined to cut throats than argue the finer points of Marxist doctrine, which he didn't care much about anyway. So the rest of the revolutionary year of 1905 in Georgia was all bombings and assassinations and fighting in the street between revolutionaries and police and Cossacks. It was really truly open revolutionary warfare down there. And the revolutionaries were clearly winning this war.

By October, the authorities only controlled really central to fleece with various revolutionary military groups controlling the rest of the city and practically the whole rest of Georgia. Stalin moved back to DeFlease himself and started living with the three sisters of one of his comrades in a dressmaking shop they operated serving the top men and women of local society. We're talking mostly here about the wives of the military officers. So while they were getting fitted for dresses, Stalin and company planned their assassinations and raids and bank robberies in the next room. All three sisters were sympathetic to the cause, and Stalin and the youngest sister, woman named Cato fell in love. She would soon become Stalin's first wife. After the high tide of revolution started to recede at the end of 1905, Stalin and his gang were hit with two punches. First, the October manifesto seemed like a pretty big win for the liberal revolutionaries and the

industrialists, the ones who had been sort of covertly supporting Stalin, and they withdrew their support. But then in January came the reactionary punitive expeditions, which were particularly brutal in Georgia, with army columns reconquering the region by force, burning and killing and marauding and breaking the back of the revolutionary groups. And though the revolutionaries managed to knock off one of the senior generals with the old grenade in the lap trick, by February and March 1906, both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were driven deep underground in Georgia. So from his heyday in 1905, Stalin was now left to reorganize a group of just about a dozen remaining hardcore loyalists, a mix of young men and women. Officially they called themselves the technical group of the expropriators club, but informally became known simply as the outfit.

This outfit included still Pansia Goldavia, and also two of her friends, Annetta and Alexandra, who were all adeptive. smugglers and gunfighters. The outfit spent all of 1906 living an existence of gangsters and bank robbers, knocking off trains and stagecoaches, robbing banks and pawn shops, extorting protection money from businesses, and getting in shootouts with anybody who tried to stop them. And they were quite successful. And also, unlike other groups who did devolve into mere banditry, Stalin in the outfit remained committed revolutionaries. They forwarded practically all the loot to Lenten. and in Finland, while they themselves lived in poverty. In April 1906, Stalin attended the Fourth Party Congress in Stockholm,

and was generally disdainful of the effete intellectuals he encountered, which contrasted with his own rough and tumble, real revolutionary activity. These men and women he met thought about revolution. Stalin actually waged revolution. And it's true, Stalin was cut from an entirely different cloth. He was smart, but he was a man of action, not an intellectual. The tool of his trade was the pistol, not the pen. In the fall of 1906, Bolshevik Center wanted to do some more fundraising,

and decided maybe they wanted to do something really big. And by the spring of 1907, Stalin had indicated that there was a juicy target, a recently open branch of the state bank in downtown to fleece. In April, 1907, a couple of the women in the outfit successfully smuggled in bombs and grenades made by Krasen. Meanwhile, Stalin had suborn two key inside accomplices, one of them a bank clerk, the other an old friend from back home now working as a clerk in the local post office who was privy to the secret schedules about movement of money. That guy then tipped off Stalin that a large shipment of cash was due to be transferred via stage. coach on June 13, 1907. Stalin then went off to the Fifth Party Congress, which we'll talk more about next week because it is pretty consequential. But while there, and in other meetings with

Lenin in Berlin, he got the go-ahead to carry out the biggest bank heist yet. Neither Lenin nor Stalin paid any attention to the verdict of the Fifth Party Congress, which was a ban, a complete ban on all future expropriations. Intense planning then went on in the dress shop where Stalin lived, and in the home of the mother of one of Stalin's closest comrades, who was herself a sympathetic co-conspirator. This was going to be a big job, the biggest ever, and outside the core members of the outfit, they also brought in other hired guns, either mercenary gangster bandits, or willing accomplices from among other revolutionary groups like the SR.

But there were some hiccups along the way. The guy who was supposed to leave the operation on the ground got arrested. And then, when they gave the job to Camo, he was placing fuses and a couple of bombs in May of 1907, and one of them exploded in his face. It did not kill him, but it badly damaged one of his eyes and put him in bed for a month. But he swore that he would be ready when the time came. And he was, because if there's one thing about Cammo,

that everybody agreed on from his revolutionary comrades to German police officers is that Camo had incredible tolerance for pain. At 10.30 a.m. on June 13th, 1907, the main square of Taflees was packed. There were tons of people, merchants, porters, men, women, and children, there always were. On this particular day, the crowd was augmented by two additional groups. First, there was a policeman or Hasak on every single street corner. They were quite visible. But there was a second group, intentionally invisible. A bunch of otherwise unremarkable people dressed as peasants milling around. Two women, Annetta and Patsia, both core members of the outfit, loitered around not drawing any attention to themselves. And inside a tavern located right off the square, about two dozen mean-looking

dudes had taken over the joint. One fellow revolutionary who was not in on the plot was spotted and invited in for a drink, and then he noticed that armed men were at the door, letting people in, but not letting them out. Cammo, meanwhile, master of disguise that he was, paraded around the square in a horse-drawn carriage dressed like and acting like a cavalry captain. Then, right on schedule, Patsia spotted a little convoy coming down the road towards the square. She gave the signal to Annetta, who then signaled the men inside the tavern. They finished their drinks, mounted up, and then spread out into the crowd of the square. Then right on time, a stage coach bearing an incredible amount of money entered the square.

It was followed by an open carriage filled to the brim with armed police officers and soldiers. Two Cossacks rode in front of this group, two Cossacks behind with another one off to. the side. Inside the main carriage was a cashier, an accountant, and two armed soldiers. The carriages crossed the square in less than a minute and approached the turnoff to the bank. One guy in the crowd, nonchalantly reading a newspaper, lowered it. And that was the signal. From out of the crowd, a handful of otherwise unremarkable-looking peasants moved towards the stagecoach. They reached into their pockets and pulled out grenades. Then they lobbed them under the wheels and horses.

Massive explosions rocked the square. They killed the horses, the men, and apparently blew out windows and toppled chimneys. People freaked out, they panicked and ran, those not killed or wounded in the blasts, mind you. And then armed men and women stepped forward with pistols and opened fire to finish off the soldiers and guards in the wreckage of the carriages. other gunmen marking the police officers who were standing guard at the various street corners opened fire on their marks and killed those officers. Witnesses then say at least six more grenades were lobbed or went off. It was all just noisy, destructive chaos with people screaming and dying and getting shot.

Now just as our revolutionary expropriators are about to converge on the stagecoach with the cash and grab the loot, one of the horses who managed to live through all of this and was still connected to the stage coach, suddenly bolted, dragging the coach behind it. One member of the gang chased it and threw a grenade, blowing the horse up and stopping the coach. But that dude was blown back by the force of the explosion and stunned unconscious. So another guy had to run up and grab the loot, and while he was stumbling out, he was helped by one of the women in the outfit, though I do not know which one it was. then Camo rode up firing his pistol in all directions and waving at them to load the cash into his carriage. They tossed the cash in, and he rode off while they fled on foot.

On his way out of the square, Camo passed a police unit coming in, and looking like a cavalry captain, he barked at them, the money is safe, get to the square. It was not until much later that they realized they had been had. Tammo successfully made it to the planned safe house, where he offloaded the money, changed clothes, and left, while a husband and wife team sowed the bundles of bills into a mattress. Patsia then arrived, having successfully gotten out of the square, and called for young porters to take the mattress to another safe house across the river. From there, they took it and deposited it on the couch of the director of the observatory, where Stalin used to work, where, it just sat on a couch, with the director not suspecting a thing, and no one else thinking that the money might be there. Back in the square, meanwhile, one of the revolutionary expropriators changed into the uniform of a teacher and came back to survey the scene, and he saw carnage.

The whole square was blown to hell, with what was later pegged at 40 dead and 50 wounded. Meanwhile, none of the robbers, none of the revolutionary expropriators, were caught. None of them were killed. The guy who was knocked unconscious, he just got up and walked away. They all got away. They got away with the money. It was all in all a huge success, and all it had cost them was a bunch of innocent bystanders killed. Stalin, who had either watched this from the outskirts or who had been waiting for,

at a train station in case it all went bad, triumphantly returned to the dress shop apartments that night, even though it was right around the corner from what was then, at that moment, the biggest crime scene in the world. He was exuberant. He had attempted the biggest job of his life and pulled it off. It was a huge success. He lost nobody, well, except for all the innocent buystanders. The Tafleas Banquist had a number of major repercussions. It made headlines worldwide, from London to Paris to New York. Public opinion, up to and including various socialist parties and leaders throughout Europe, were aghast at the injury and death toll.

This included the Mensheviks and huge swaths of the rest of the party membership. But the thing is, at least right after the bank heist, nobody knew who did it. Stilippen's Interior Ministry assigned a special detective unit to investigate. But for months, nobody knew who. who had done it. Polish nationalists, some lone anarchists sell, Armenian partisans, SRs, social democrats. Since literally all the suspects got away, the police had nothing to go on. And Stalin and the gang did not publicize their involvement because it would have gotten them in big trouble with the party, which it did when the party found out it was them.

Later, Camo and one of the women from the outfit, although again I don't know which one it was, unfortunately, retrieved the money from the observatory and smuggled it to Finland, using a phony passport and credentials provided by a sympathetic Georgian prince, showing them to be a young, newlywed couple. Camo then stayed with Lenin and Krupskaya in Finland for the rest of the summer. Now, a big open question, too, is exactly how much they wound up stealing. It was somewhere between 250 and 350,000 rubles, which reckoned in today's money is somewhere between $3 and $4 million. This is a lot of money.

But when they opened the satchels and started to look at it, there was a big problem. Most of it was in 500-ruble notes, all of which were bearing serial numbers, which were known to the authorities. So you can't just take one of these notes to any old bank and not expect to get arrested when you present it to the teller. Now, probably about 91,000 rubles worth was in unmarked small bills. But these big bills, these 500-ruble notes,

were practically unusable, unless they figured out some kind of strategy for cashing them in. Krupskaya said later in her memoirs, The money obtained in the Tiflese raid was handed over to the Bolsheviks for revolutionary purposes, but the money could not be used. It was all in 500-ruble notes,

which had to be chivaled. changed. This could not be done in Russia as the banks always had lists of notes in such cases. But she also said, the money was badly needed, so they're going to have to figure something out. Camo took the untraceable bills and proceeded to travel around to Paris and then Belgium and then Bulgaria, buying more arms for future expropriations, before landing in Berlin, where he met with an emigre-Bolshevik doctor to finally get his eye properly checked out. But this guy, completely trusted at the time, turned out to be an Arana double agent. He alerted his handlers that he was currently in contact with one of the ringleaders of the Tafleas bank robbery.

The first inkling the authorities had about who did the job. They contact the German authorities who detained Camo and found fake passports and a bunch of explosives, which was more than enough to arrest and hold him. When Camo was arrested, Leonid Crasen sent word that he should fake insanity, which Camo did. Famously faking insanity for three full years, doing all kinds of crazy stuff like eating his own feces, refusing to sleep, and talking to a pet bird he somehow managed to capture and tame.

The Germans literally tortured him with like hot needles under the fingernails and stuff like that, to break his act and prove that he was faking. But Camo never broke, because he had this insane tolerated. for pain. Extradited back to Russia, he wound up in a prison mental asylum, where he escaped in 1911 and immediately went back to planning more bank robberies. As I said, Camus' arrest at the end of 1907 was the first time the authorities realized that this was a Bolshevik bank heist. It was the first moment everybody realized it was a Bolshevik bank heist. Lenin quickly concluded that the Finnish authorities, who had been sort of tolerating his presence,

might very well conclude he had gone too far, so he and Krupskaya headed back to Switzerland. And Lenin made his way to a train station trying to avoid checkpoints by crossing an iced over lake and nearly drowned when the ice started to give way, which led Lenin to say that it would have been a really stupid way to die. By the end of 1907 and beginning of 1908, the Bolsheviks made one good attempt to cash out the marked bills.

They settled on a plan for age of, in various European capitals outside the Russian Empire to take small amounts of these bills and just hope they could get away with it, or at least enough of them could get away with it. Krupskaya said the money was badly needed, and so a group of comrades made an attempt to change the 500-ruble notes simultaneously in various towns abroad. But the informer doctor in Berlin was told of the plan, and he trolled the Russian authorities, who then turned around and told everybody in Europe to please be on the look at the look. for criminals trying to cash the Tifleese bank notes.

In January 1908, they tried it, and it failed. Bank managers across Europe had been alerted to be on the lookout for 500-Rubel Russian notes, and everyone who tried to bring some in, whether in Stockholm or Geneva or Paris, was arrested. As you can imagine, all of this caused further ruptures between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Martoff and his compatriots were furious when they found out the Bolsheviks were behind it. They spent years conducting their own internal investigation, interviewing Stalin's accomplices like the post office clerk and the bank clerk. And though never officially kicked out of the party, Stalin does appear to have been expelled from the Georgian local party, which was run by his enemies, the Mensheviks. He then departed his homeland basically never to return.

Lenin, meanwhile, had been careful enough about his own involvement that nothing solid could ever be pinned on him. But the whole incident marked the end of his support for expropriations, and this led to a split among the Bolsheviks, because Krasn and Bogdanov both wanted to keep going with this stuff, and they were furious at Lenin for playing dumb and then backing off of future projects. So it was just fractures, inside of fractures, inside of fractures. finally, most of the rest of the bills, all those 500-ruble notes, wound up being burned. All of that, just to make a little fire. So that's the story of the Tafleas Bank robbery.

Next week, we will come back to the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party and talk more about what went on at the Fifth Party Congress and how that was supposed to be a moment of final unification and instead really set the states for their final divorce as everybody settled back into being emigres in the reactionary period after the Stalipan reforms. It was also at this fifth party Congress that Trotsky, who had been arrested and sent into exile, finally returned, and he was now ready to pitch his comrades on a new theory he had developed, a theory of permanent revolution.