GENEVA: The main, who punched Stalin in the face and lived to tell the tale, is rounding out his long life denouncing the brutal terror of the communist system, whose founders he once plotted with.
At 75, white-haired Khariton Chavichvily is a man who has known conspiracy, revolution and terror.
In a Geneva café, he plotted during 1908 with Lenin for the overthrow of Russia’s Romanov Dynasty and the end of the reign of Nicholas II, Czar of all Russia.
In the uncertain years before World War I, Geneva harboured scores of Russian revolutionaries. Such brilliant intriguers as Lenin, Trotsky, Pleikhsanov etc. gathered at the Café Landolt.
“In those days Khrushchev was nothing,” said Chavichvily, sitting at one of the tables where he sat with Lenin more than 50 years ago.
Chavichvily, who considers himself the last of the Mensheviks, still is denouncing and protesting. But this time it is not the Romanov regime he is against, but the terror of communism which long ago he, too, wanted to build.
His conflict with terror goes back to the time he slapped Stalin in the face and got away with it.
Chavichvily, who comes from Georgia, as did Stalin, agitated for communism in his youth and took part in the 1905 revolt which gave imperial Russia the ominous forecast of the bloody revolution that came 12 years later.
In 1905 he argued for three nights running with Stalin, a Bolshevik, and Ramishvilli, a Menshevik, at Tchiatouri in Georgia. (The Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks had split at the London Communist Congress in 1903 because the Bolsheviks advocated force and the Mensheviks advised peaceful means for installing communism.)
“Stalin, who was then called Koba, roughed up a good friend of mine, so I punched him in the face,” Chavichvily said. “Stalin only smiled back at me.”
In 1905 Chavichvily joined Lenin in Geneva. But when Lenin asked him to ride on the famous sealed train to Leningrad’s Finland station to spur on the revolution in 1917, he refused.
Between the Wars he worked in Berne as a journalist and through secret contacts was able to leak news of politburo meetings in Moscow.
