ABSTRACT
After the London congress in April 1907 Lenin summoned Koba, Litvinov, Krasin and Bogdanov to Berlin because of extraordinary developments.1 At the end of 1906 Kamo and Litvinov paid a large sum of money for arms but failed to smuggle them to the Caucasus. Their yacht Zora with the arms shipment had been swept into shallow waters and sank off the Rumanian coast of the Black Sea. Kamo was arrested by the Rumanian police. The director of the Department of Police, Trusevich, announced that the Zora had been carrying ‘no less than 2,000 rapid-fire rifles, 650,000 rounds of ammunition, many boxes of bombs and grenades and a considerable quantity of illegal literature’.2 The Russian government requested Kamo’s extradition, but the Rumanian authorities released him. Litvinov urgently asked Lenin for money to buy a new shipment of arms, and this was the reason for the meeting in Berlin. The decision reached was for Koba and Kamo to stage a massive expropriation in Tiflis in the summer of 1907.
