Kamo (revolutionary)

Kamo 1922

Kamo , actually Semjon (Simon) Arshakovich Ter-Petrosyan (also often transliterated as Petrossian or Petrosian) (born May 6, 1882 in Gori , Russian Empire , † July 14, 1922 in Tbilisi ) was a Georgian revolutionary ( Bolshevik ) and an Armenian politician Ancestry.

Live and act

Early years (1882-1906)

Kamo was born in the Georgian city of Gori, the son of the wealthy businessman Arshak Ter-Petrosyan and his wife Maria. After he was expelled from school in 1898, his parents sent him to Tbilisi to continue his education. There he met the young Josef Dschugaschwili, later Josef Stalin , who inspired him for the teachings of Marxism and was able to win over the cause of the revolutionary Russian social democracy, which he joined in 1902.

Ter-Petrossian received the nickname Kamo from Stalin when he repeatedly mispronounced the word komu or кому for "whom" as kamo while learning the Russian language . This later became his code and nickname.

Kamo's first revolutionary action was the dropping of socialist pamphlets in the orchestra pit of the Armenian Opera House in Tbilisi in February 1903. He was one of the founders of a large illegal printing press of the Social Democrats in Tbilisi and was one of the organizers of the First Congress of Caucasian Social Democratic Organizations. In November of the same year he was arrested for the first time for carrying revolutionary literature. After spending four months in solitary confinement in the city of Batumi , he managed - after returning to the regular prison system - to infect himself with malaria and to use a stay in the prison infirmary in September 1904 to escape.

The twenty-three-year-old Kamo took an active part in the Russian Revolution of 1905, where he was injured five times. He met the leader of the Bolsheviks, Lenin , in March 1906 in St. Petersburg , to whom he had given a large sum of the money stolen from the bank of the city of Kutaisi "for the needs of the revolution". In Petersburg he became a member of an illegal bomb-making laboratory. He brought the knowledge gained there back to Georgia, where he had headed several small laboratories. Kamo became one of the experts in the field of weapons and explosives manufacture. In the middle of 1906 he traveled abroad with Maxim Litvinov to provide advice on the acquisition of a large load of weapons. During these years Kamo became a close follower of the young Stalin, on whose behalf he committed numerous assaults, arson and murders. Kamo - to which many witnesses and authors assume psychopathy and mental illness - was characterized above all by his brutality and unscrupulousness. The Stalin biographer Montefiore notes that Kamo had expressed the wish to the young Stalin to “slit open necks for him” and emphasized at the same point the “joy” the brigant had in his work. As evidence of this, he cites, among other things, how Kamo cut out the heart of a living man.

The established bandit and revolutionary (1907–1917)

In 1907 Kamo was seriously injured by a self-made bomb, so that from then on his left eye was half-blind and he had a conspicuous squint. On June 13 of the same year, Kamo led the attack on the Bank of Tbilisi , planned by Josef Stalin , in which he stole 250,000 rubles for the Bolshevik cause. After Kamo had handed the booty over to Lenin and with him spent the month of July in a dacha in Kuokkala in the Grand Duchy of Finland , which belongs to Russia , he fled to Germany, where he - discovered by an agent provocateur named Schitomirski - in Berlin, Elsässerstrasse in November 1907 2, was arrested as an "anarchist terrorist" with a suitcase full of dynamite. After he had faked a mental illness for six months on the advice of a lawyer commissioned by Krassin to avoid extradition to Russia, he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in May 1908. After a year in a psychiatric hospital, he was declared "terminally mentally ill", which made a criminal conviction impossible, and he was brought back to Berlin. In November 1909 he was finally transferred to Russia, where he was initially imprisoned in Tbilisi and later transferred to a mental hospital. He was able to escape from there in August 1911 immediately after his chains, with which he was immobilized, had been removed. He avoided being persecuted by the police by hiding in the local police headquarters.

Kamo then fled first to Constantinople and later to Paris, where he met Lenin again. After an operation in Belgium, in which , according to a letter from Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaya , Kamo's strabismus, which made him easily recognizable for investigators, was fixed, he returned to Tbilisi at the end of 1912.

After another attack in January 1913, he was arrested again and sentenced to death in March, but pardoned to mark the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty to twenty years of forced labor, which he spent from 1915 in Kharkov , where he worked as a seamstress. Essad Bey explains in his Stalin biography (1931) that even the public prosecutor considered it inadmissible to execute a man like Kamo, who in his dull and animal simplicity did not understand his murderous acts; he filed a pardon for Kamo, which the court obeyed.

Because of this phase of his life in particular, Kamo became a "legendary figure", especially in Russia and Germany in the first half of the 20th century, whose adventures - both real and fictional - met with great interest. That impression was reinforced by the picturesque features of Kamo's criminal activities, such as his extraordinary talent in disguise, his talent as a prison breaker ("the Houdini the escapist") and his numerous daring hussar pieces, such as the cowboy-like jump on the driver's seat of a fast-moving money transporter during the attack on the Bank of Tbilisi 1907.

Late years (1917–1922)

Immediately after the February 1917 Revolution, Kamo was released in March of that year to rejoin the Bolsheviks . After participating in the October Revolution, Kamo began working with the Cheka and the Red Army from 1918 . As an emissary, Kamo delivered several letters between Lenin and Stepan Shahumyan in December 1917 .

After Shahumjan's appointment as extraordinary commissioner, Kamo returned to Tbilisi. In 1919 he went by boat to Astrakhan , where he built up a partisan group that operated in the vicinity of Kursk and Oryol . In January 1920 he was captured by the Mensheviks in Tbilisi and briefly detained. In March 1920 he went to Baku to prepare for the Sovietization of the city. In May he came to Moscow, where he worked in the Ministry of Foreign Trade. Returning to Tbilisi again, he worked as the head of the Transcaucasian customs authority in the finance commission. From 1959 to 1996, the city previously known as Nor-Bajaset in Armenia (now Gawar ) bore his name.

Kamo died in July 1922 in a motorcycle accident in Tbilisi, where the suspicion is often expressed that it was "arranged" by Stalin. Essad Bey explains in his Stalin biography on page 135 that one day Kamo, conscious of victory, was walking along Werystraße in Tbilisi and was fatally run over by a truck. The truck driver was said to have been shot by the local Cheka on the same day on the orders of Stalin.

Kamo, whom Lenin benevolently referred to as his “Caucasian bandit” and Stalin nostalgically in his later years as a “truly fantastic person”, left behind self-written memoirs which - kept in Russian archives - have not yet been published, but are occasionally used by historians.

literature

Archival material

• GF IML 8.5.384.3-10. (Autobiographical records)
• GF IML 8.5.380.5-6. (Personal files and questionnaires)

Monographs and Articles

• Thomas Parschik: Kamo, bank robbers of the revolution in Das Blättchen , 20th year, No. 7 from March 27, 2017
• IM Dubinsky-Mukhadze: Kamo, Moscow, 1974.
• Anna Geifman (Ed.): Russia and the Last Tsar . (Pp. 1-14).
• Anna Geifman: Thou Shalt Kill .
• R. Imnaishvili: Kamo .
• David Shub: Kamo - The Legendary Old Bolshevik of the Caucasus . In: Russian Review, Vol. 19 (3), 1960, pp. 227-247.
• Simon Sebag-Montefiore : Young Stalin . German: The young Stalin . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-050608-5 .
• David Shub: Lenin . 1957, pages 118-124.
• Essad Bey: Stalin . Berlin 1931. Pages 132–135.

swell

1. ↑ Simon Sebag-Montefiore: The young Stalin , Frankfurt am Main, 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-050608-5
2. ↑ Simon Sebag-Montefiore: Young Stalin , p. 4.
3. ↑ (Essad Bey, Berlin, Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1931, Stalin, pages 132-135)
4. ↑ Simon Sebag-Montefiore: Young Stalin , p. 227