Death of Kamo (July 14, 1922)
Simon Ter-Petrosian, better known by his nome de guerre Kamo, was a Bolshevik revolutionary and an early companion to Joseph Stalin.
He was born on May 27, 1882, in Gori (Georgia) to an Armenian family. His father was a wealthy contractor who reputedly tyrannized his family. He was the oldest of a dozen children, of whom seven died in their childhood.
Between the age of seven and eleven, he attended an Armenian school, although the family spoke Georgian at home and he struggled with lessons in Armenian. At 11, he was transferred to a municipal school and forced to learn Russian, according to his official biography. In 1895-1898 he was enrolled in a local school, where he remained for three years until being expelled.
He was sent to the Tiflis Theological Seminary and Joseph Jugashvili (the future Joseph Stalin), who was a student at the seminar, helped him prepare for his entrance examinations. Stalin was expelled in 1898 and Ter-Petrosian in 1901.
By 1902, Kamo had adopted his pseudonym, which originated from his lack of fluency in the Russian language, since he kept saying kamo instead of komu (“to whom”) when he was being taught Russian grammar. He joined a secret Social Democratic organization in Tiflis. He was given the tasks of distributing leaflets, organizing meetings, gathering outlawed publications, and moving illegal printing presses.
In December 1903, a gendarme stopped Kamo, searched his bag, and found outlawed revolutionary literature. He was arrested and imprisoned, but he managed to escape climbing the prison wall.
During the revolution of 1905, Kamo got acquainted with Vladimir Lenin and other leading Bolsheviks. He never wrote anything, but instead, he trained new revolutionaries.
After the revolution, the government demanded that all radical groups disarm. The Social Democratic Party was split between the more moderate Mensheviks who favored disarming and the hard line Bolsheviks, who kept their weapons. Security forces moved to confiscate Bolshevik arms and suppress the group. Kamo led the defense of the Bolshevik stronghold in Tiflis against the police and army. On January 31, 1906, state forces crushed the rebels in the Tiflis workers’ district. Kamo was almost killed in the firefight and was captured, but soon escaped from prison.
To fund revolutionary activities, Lenin endorsed the use of “expropriations”, a euphemism for armed robbery of state banks and instructed Stalin to create a group of expropriators with a leader who would rather die than reveal the plan should he be arrested. Stalin appointed Kamo.
In April 1907, high ranking Bolsheviks decided that Stalin and Kamo should organize a robbery in Tiflis to obtain funds to purchase arms. Stalin managed to discover that there was going to be a large shipment of money by horse-drawn carriage to the Tiflis Bank on June 26, 1907.
After a daring bombing and shooting operation in Yerevan Square that cost the life of about forty people, Kamo and his group managed to rob about 341,000 rubles, worth approximately 4 million dollars in our days. A large portion of the stolen money was eventually moved by Kamo, who took the money to Lenin in Finland.
Months later, Kamo was arrested in Berlin and feigned insanity so that he would be declared unfit to stand trial. After many cruel tests, the chief doctor of the Berlin asylum wrote in June 1909 that there was no doubt that he was not feigning insanity. He was extradited and tried in April 1910 for his role in the Tiflis robbery. The trial was suspended while officials examined Kamo’s sanity. The court found that he was sane when he committed the Tiflis robbery, but was presently mentally ill and should be confined until he recovered.
In August 1911, after feigning insanity for more than three years, Kamo escaped from the psychiatric ward of the Tiflis prison by sawing his window bars and climbing down a homemade rope.
After escaping, Kamo met up with Lenin in Paris. After leaving Paris, he planned another armed robbery, but he was caught before the robbery took place and put on trial in Tiflis for his exploits including the Tiflis bank robbery. This time, he did not feign insanity and was given four death sentences. He was fortunate enough to have his sentence commuted to a long prison term as part of the celebrations of the Romanov dynasty tricentennial and was released from prison after the February Revolution of 1917.
After the Russian civil war was over, Kamo worked in the Soviet customs office. He died in a road accident on July 14, 1922, when a truck hit him while he was cycling.
Streets were named after Kamo and statues were built throughout the Soviet Union. The city of Nor Bayazid in Armenia was renamed Kamo and the name lasted until the second independence, when the city was renamed after its historical name of Gyavar.