The Djugashvili - Gang
Kamo: Maniac, psychopath, revolutionary, terrorist, adventurer, killer, bank robber,…
Born in 1882 as Semjon (Simon) Arschakowitsch Ter-Petrosjan in Gori / Georgia, son of an upperclass family. .
He met Djugashvili in Tiflis and became a close friend to young Stalin.
Together they supported the Russian revolution and the Russian Socialdemocratic Party. After its break up into two factions, the Mensheviki and the more radical Bolsheviki, they sided with Lenin and the Bolsheviks. for the benefit of the party, many raids and robberies were commited by them, although the Socialdemocratic Party was strictly against this kind of direct actions.
In 1904, he got arrested for "revolutionary actions" (passing around flyers…) and he managed to break out of prison, by infecting himself with Malaria. When he was transferred to the Prison-Hospital, he made his way out.
He took part in the Russian revolution of 1905 and got wounded several times. In 1906 he met Lenin and from that time on he was Djugashvili's "Hitman". Under the command of young Stalin, he lead many raids, attacks and assassinations, as a member of his gang.
He was described as a cruel, brutal and a joyful killer.
In 1907 his eye got injured by the explosion of a self-constructed bomb.
In the same year the Djugashvili-Gang did its biggest coup:
The bankraid of Tiflis. Militants under the command of Stalin threw several bombs on the crowd at the marketplace, when a stagecoach filled with money from the Tiflis bank was passing by. The place was filled with maimed and dead people as well as horses, total chaos! The stagecoach was about to drive away, before the bandits could get out the loot, because the horses were going wild. Kamo jumped like a cowboy on the running coach and managed to save the money and the day. The amount was 250000 Rubels for the bolshevist cause.
After that "Big Bang" he was on the run, first to Finland , then he fled to Germany. There he got caught (by a plot of an agent provocateur with a suitcase of bombs) and he simulated madness for not being sent back to Russia. He stayed in a German psychiatry over a year, then they deported him to Russia, where he spent another two years in an "insane asylum" until he finally managed to escape. It is said that he avoided prosecution by the authorities by hiding himself in the police headquarters…one of the many legends about him.
He definitely became a legendary character, in Russia as well as in Germany, around that time period. Kamo fled over Constantinople and Paris to Belgium, were he had an eye-OP, because since his "accident" he was squint-eyed, so he could be recognized easily by the cops, even in his most adventurous dress-ups (like woman, cossak captain, etc…)
He returned in 1912 to Tiflis and after a couple of raids and terrorist attacks he got caught again in 1913, when he was sentenced to death. Through an amnesty, because of the 300 year celebration of the Romanov-dynasty, he got a 20 years forced-labor term (what a lucky bastard^^).
He was freed by the February Revolution in 1917 and after taking part in the October Revolution, he worked for the Tcheka and was a member of the Red Army.
In the civil war phase his gangster career was over and he got more into an apparatchik of the Communist Party. He died in a motorcycle accident in 1922, there are rumours about an involvement of his old friend Stalin and his death.
That's more or less in short what I found out about him.
Leaves me still with a lot of questions:
Like, how big was his Marxist impact on his ideologies and way of thinking?
Was he also an anti-Semite like Stalin?
What were his connections in Germany, with which circles did he get in touch during his short time in Berlin?
Who knows some more gangster stories about the Djugashvili-Gang?



Ioseb Djugashvili aka Stalin, the Caucasian convent school pupil, acted on the political stage like he was still the gangsterboss from Tiflis. His way of seizing power, spreading terror, killing all rivals, getting everyone out of the way, who might be dangerous, leaving no living witnesses…
Climbing up the ladder, from a young criminal, to be the leader of a big gangster syndicate, of a revolutionary party, finally of a huge country, he was something like the prototype of what Horkheimer/Adorno described as a "racket".
Even the Hitler-Stalin Pact can be seen in this perception as a Big Deal between two enemy gang leaders, marking their claims for their territories, so that they don't mess with each other's business, because they weren't already fully prepaired for the final confrontation. The loot of this coup was Poland and the glue between these two totally different characters Hitler and Stalin was anti-Semitism.