Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  Falsification came easily to him. The first sentence of that official biography was a lie because Joseph Dzhughashvili entered this life not on 21 December 1879 but on 6 December 1878. The truth has been ascertained by searches in the parochial records in Gori.3 It is uncertain why he practised this deceit. But it was not a mistake: Stalin was always careful about such details. We can only speculate at this distance in time. Apparently he started to fib about his birthday after leaving the Spiritual Seminary in Tbilisi, and it may be that his motive was to avoid military conscription: certainly many Georgians in those years tampered with the records for this purpose. Another possibility is that he was simply trying to confuse the police as to when he entered the revolutionary movement.4

  About some things he told the truth. His father Besarion (or Vissarion in Russian) was indeed a cobbler married to Ketevan (or Yekaterina in Russian) and they lived in Gori. The Dzhughashvilis were subjects of the Russian tsars. The completed conquest of the Caucasus region had occurred only in the mid-1860s after the capture of the Islamist rebel Shamil from Dagestan Imperial forces in 1859. Parts of Georgia had not altogether lost their autonomous status until the second half of the nineteenth century. It had been the east Georgian ruler Irakli II who in 1783 had requested that his kingdom should become a Russian protectorate. Further territorial adhesions followed from the territory of the Georgians. Steadily the tsars repealed the agreements to grant exemptions from the pattern of rule in the rest of their empire. Garrisons were established. The Georgian Orthodox Church’s autocephaly was abolished in 1811. Russian peasants were given land in Georgia. The teaching of the Georgian language was restricted in schools and seminaries. The Georgian press was cramped. Georgians were robbed of their national dignity by the Russian administrators and commanders sent to the south Caucasus.

  The little town of Gori in central Georgia lies by the fast-flowing River Mtkvari (or Kura, as the Russians call it). It is surrounded by hills. On the highest of them, to the north, there perches a large medieval fort — Goristikhe — which in the nineteenth century was almost as big as the town it overlooked: its crenellated walls and towers stretch like a huge octopus down the slopes. The valley is wide at Gori and the nearby hills are wooded with hazel, walnut, fir and chestnut trees. On clear days the mountains of the Caucasus are visible in the distance. When Joseph was a boy, the population tipped a little over twenty thousand. Most churches in the town belonged to the Georgian Orthodox Church; but many Armenians, a few hundred Russians and some Jews also lived there — and there was even a religious colony of Dukhobors.5 The best local education, available only to boys, was offered at the Spiritual School. Most employment in Gori was connected to trade with peasants who came to the town with sacks of grapes, potatoes, tomatoes, nuts, pomegranates and wheat as well as their cattle, pigs and sheep. The town is over fifty miles by road from the Georgian capital Tbilisi, which it took two days to reach on foot. There was much poverty in Gori. This had been the norm for peasants for centuries; but most nobles too in the late nineteenth century had fallen on hard times.

  Gori had no large enterprises; its economy was dominated by handicrafts and trade. Onions, garlic, cucumbers, sweet peppers, cabbages, radishes, potatoes and aubergines grew in a perfect climate, and the Atenuri wine produced from the Ateni grape was highly appreciated. The sheep and cattle kept on the little hillside farms were famous for their succulence. In Gori itself there was a flourishing commerce in leather and wool, and craftsmen made shoes, coats and carpets. Shops and stalls were everywhere. Most of the owners were tailors, cobblers and carpenters. Professional employment was mainly confined to the priests and teachers. Policemen kept order. There were several taverns where men took solace in the bottle. It was a scene that had changed little since the Russians had entered Georgia at the request of its various rulers from the late eighteenth century. Yet even Gori was changing. In 1871 it acquired a railway station down by the River Mtkvari. The trains enabled passengers to get to Tbilisi in two or three hours. Commercial and industrial penetration of the area was just a matter of time.

  Georgians like the Dzhughashvilis dressed plainly. Women wore long black skirts and, when they were in church, they donned head-scarves. The priests had black cassocks. The other men were no more colourful. Black jackets, shirts and trousers were customary and there was no pressure on working-class males to look smart. Men expected to rule their households with their wives’ complete obedience — and Besarion was notorious for his bad temper and violence. Women carried out all the domestic chores, including the cooking. This was one of the glories of old Georgia, whose cuisine was a stunning combination of the tastes of the eastern Mediterranean and the Caucasus. Outstanding dishes included sturgeon in pomegranate sauce, spicy pork kebabs and aubergines with walnut paste. The basic salads were also excellent. The Kutaisi combination of tomatoes, onions, coriander and ground walnuts was a meal in itself. But poor families, even if they retained links with the countryside, would rarely have the opportunity to eat such a diet in full. In fact people like the Dzhughashvilis would subsist mainly on beans and bread. Life for most inhabitants of Gori was hard and there was little prospect of betterment.

  Besarion married nineteen-year-old Ketevan Geladze on 17 May 1874. Her father had died when she was young and she and her mother had had to get by as best they could in the little village of Gambareuli.6 Ketevan — known to family and acquaintances as Keke — quickly became pregnant. In fact she had two sons before Joseph’s arrival. The first was Mikhail, who died when only one year old. Then came Giorgi, but he too died young. Joseph alone survived early childhood. Taken to church on 17 December 1878, he was baptised by archpriest Khakhanov and catechist Kvinikadze.7

  Christened Joseph, he was known to everyone by the diminutive Soso. Little else — in fact nothing at all — is known about the very earliest years of his life. It might have been expected that Joseph’s mother and father, having suffered the loss of two sons in infancy, would have treated their third with special care and affection. This would also have been in keeping with the Georgian tradition to dote on a new baby in the family. The Georgians are more like the Italians and Greeks than the peoples of northern Europe in child rearing. Besarion Dzhughashvili was an exception because he never showed his son any kindliness. Keke tried to make up for this. Though a strict and demanding mother, she made him feel special and dressed him as well as her finances allowed. Besarion resented this. Keke set her heart on Joseph becoming educated and entering the priesthood whereas Besarion wanted him to be a cobbler like himself. Almost from the beginning the Dzhughashvilis had an unhappy relationship; and far from alleviating the situation, Joseph’s arrival exacerbated the tension between them.

  Besarion had a temperament that often flared up into angry violence against his wife. His commercial ambitions did not meet with success. His cobbler’s shop failed to move with the times by producing the European-style shoes — rather than traditional Georgian footwear — which were becoming the popular norm.8 Whatever he tried always ended in failure, and his lack of success as an independent artisan and his loss of local esteem probably aggravated his tendency to volcanic outbursts. His drinking got out of control. He spent more time guzzling wine at Yakob Egnatashvili’s tavern than tending to his family obligations.9

  Keke according to most accounts was a devout woman. She attended church, consulted priests and was eager for her son to become one of them. But there were rumours which placed her in a different light. Sergo Beria, son of Stalin’s police chief from 1938, wrote that his grandmother — who befriended Keke in old age — told of a loose-living woman with a line in smutty talk: ‘When I was young I cleaned house for people and when I came upon a good-looking boy I didn’t waste the opportunity.’ When Besarion could not supply money for the family’s needs, Keke allegedly went out and sold her body.10 A less extreme version was that, although she was not serially promiscuous, she had an affair with one of Gori’s prominent personalities. The usual candidates w
ere tavern keeper Yakob Egnatashvili and local police chief Damian Davrishevi.11 As is not unusual in such a situation, proof is lacking; but circumstantial evidence filled the gap for the gossip-mongers. When Stalin attained supreme power, he promoted the sons of Egnatashvili to high rank and this is sometimes taken as a sign of special kinship with them.12

  Soso’s paternity was also sometimes ascribed to Damian Davrishevi. Damian’s son Joseph, a childhood friend of Joseph Dzhughashvili, could not help noticing their physical likeness; and in later life Joseph Davrishevi did not exclude the possibility that they were half-brothers.13 Enquiries were made in the late 1950s in order to gather damning evidence on Stalin; and the authorities were not averse to discovering whether the image of Keke as a God-fearing, simple peasant woman was a myth. If mud could be thrown at his mother, some of it would land on him. But nothing of the kind was found.

  Yet if rumours of this kind were rife during Stalin’s childhood, they can hardly have calmed Besarion’s troubled mind. They may well have been the fundamental motive behind his descent into drunkenness, hooliganism and domestic violence. Known as Mad Beso, he got into scrapes as his business went into decline. He was going to the bad, and Keke took what solace she could in the local church. She also eked out a living by working as a cleaner and seamstress: she was determined that the family should not be dragged down by her bad-tempered, incompetent husband. Beso himself saw that there was no commercial future for him in Gori. Like other artisans, he sought work in the growing industrial sector in Tbilisi. There he became employed as a labourer in Emile Adelkhanov’s large shoe factory in 1884. The hours were long, the pay low. Beso continued to drink heavily and there is no sign that he remitted much money home to Keke. His visits to Gori brought wife and son no solace: drunkenness and violence were all they could expect from the wastrel. The more he degenerated, the more Keke took emotional and spiritual refuge within the walls of the parish church.

  Other versions exist of Joseph’s ancestry. The most bizarre suggests that one of the most famous ethnographers and explorers of the day, the noble Nikolai Przewalski, had an illicit liaison with Keke Dzhughashvili and that Joseph was the product. This is not only unlikely: it is physically impossible. Przewalski was not even present in Georgia at the time when Joseph Dzhughashvili was conceived.14 None of this is very surprising. As rulers from obscure backgrounds become famous it is conventional for legends to grow up about them, and often the rumour starts that in reality their parentage was more illustrious than it seemed.

  A variant of this is that the leader was not of the nationality that was claimed. In Stalin’s case the word was that he was not Georgian at all but an Ossetian. This would trace the ancestry of the Dzhughashvili family (but not the Geladze) to the mountains beyond Georgia’s northern frontier. The name itself could well have a non-Georgian root of precisely this kind. The peoples of the Caucasus had moved around the region for centuries and even the sleepy town of Gori had its interlopers long before the Russians imposed themselves. Behind the story of Ossetian descent, though, lies the innuendo that this explains the wildness of Stalin’s later tyranny since the mountain peoples are widely regarded as less civilised than the town dwellers of the valleys. For some Georgians, moreover, such a genealogy expunges their shame in being associated with so notorious a despot. None of his school friends mentions any of this in his memoirs, but attention was almost certainly drawn to it in his childhood.15 Although Joseph Dzhughashvili grew up proud of belonging by birth and culture to the Georgian people, he may have disguised an early sense of being different from most other boys in the town.

  The stories told by Stalin to friends and relatives from the 1930s onwards are one of the main sources for what happened in his childhood. Yet it hardly needs to be emphasised that he was an inveterate liar — and even when not lying directly, he often exaggerated or distorted the truth. His usual tale of childhood was filled with outbursts of drunken violence by Besarion, but all his stories have to be treated with caution. When in 1931 Stalin was asked about his childhood by the writer Emile Ludwig, he strenuously rebuffed suggestions of mistreatment: ‘No,’ he asserted, ‘my parents were uneducated people but they didn’t handle me at all badly.’16 This was out of line with his other recollections. He told his daughter Svetlana about how he stood up to his father and threw a knife at him when Keke was taking yet another beating. The knife missed its aim. Besarion hurled himself at young Joseph but was too slow to catch him. Joseph ran off and was hidden by neighbours until his father’s rage had spent itself.17

  The memoirs of his friends without exception affirm that Beso was a brute to his son. Keke too was reportedly not averse to giving him a thrashing.18 If this was true, the Dzhughashvili household was filled with violence, and little Joseph must have grown up assuming that this was in the natural order of things. Perhaps he contradicted this when being interviewed by Ludwig because he sensed that he was being probed for a psychological origin of his political severity. No psychoanalytical sophistication is required. Like many who have been bullied in childhood, Joseph grew up looking for others whom he could bully. Not everyone beaten by parents acquires a murderous personality. Yet some do, and it would seem that more do than is true for general society. What made things worse for Joseph’s subsequent development was that his father’s violence was neither merited nor predictable. It is scarcely astounding that he grew up with a strong tendency towards resentment and retaliation.

  Keke Dzhughashvili was strict with him but also smothered him with attention and affection. In an unguarded moment with Soviet army commander Georgi Zhukov in the Second World War he said that she never let him out of her sight till he was six years old. He also said that he had been a sickly infant.19 This was putting it mildly. Around the age of six he fell victim to smallpox. His mother was frantic. Smallpox was often a fatal disease and for a time it looked as if she would lose him. Poor families like the Dzhughashvilis could not afford doctors’ visits and their medicines. Most people in Gori in any case retained faith in the rural ways of dealing with disease. A female healer — Stalin was later to call her a znakharka when speaking in Russian — was summoned to treat Joseph. Against the odds, he recovered. The after-effects were limited to facial pockmarks. Joseph Dzhughashvili had had a narrow escape. This was to be a pattern in years to come. Although Joseph was prone to illnesses, his physical resilience saw him through.20

  It would not be a surprise if the crisis strengthened maternal protectiveness. Keke’s disappointment in her husband was sublimated into high expectations of her Joseph — and the fact that he was her only surviving child intensified her preoccupation with him. Keke was a typical Georgian woman of the period. There was no realistic opportunity for her to break out of the vicious circle of poverty. The best she could do was to earn a little from cleaning and sewing for better-off families. This would alleviate the poverty. But basic improvement would have to wait until the next generation. Joseph was her sole hope.

  Yet she could not keep him in the house for ever. Joseph had a mind of his own and wanted to be accepted by the other boys. Once Joseph started to go out on to the streets, however, he had to cope with another challenge. The boys in Gori formed gangs in each little district. There was a lot of rough-and-tumble. There was much mixing of the various national groups. Respect accrued to those lads who could look after themselves in wrestling contests organised out of sight of the adults. Fist fights were common. Joseph, who had been tied to his mother’s apron strings, took time to assert himself. His contemporary Kote Charkviani wrote: ‘Before he was enrolled at school, not a day passed without someone thumping him, and he would either go back home in tears or else he himself would rough someone up.’21 But as Charkviani noted, Joseph was determined to prevail. No matter how many times he was knocked down, he got back up and fought on. He broke the rules if it helped him to win. Joseph was sly. He was also ambitious: he wanted to lead the gang and was resentful when he did not get his way.

  But his
mother continued to adore him and point him in the direction of an ecclesiastical career; and he was obliged to conform whenever she was near him. Regular church attendance was obligatory. Soon he caught the attention of influential figures in the town. Joseph was God-fearing and bright. He was exactly the sort of boy whom the priests wanted to admit to the Gori Spiritual School, especially in the light of his mother’s wish for him to enter the clergy. Joseph was given a place in summer 1888 in his tenth year. His studies would start in September.

  Poor though the Dzhughashvili family was, Joseph was being given a chance only a few dozen boys got in the town: he was going to be educated. He would receive a small stipend of three rubles a month.22 A portrait of him as he commenced his studies comes from a memoir by Vano Ketskhoveli:23