Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  As editors and publishers they were very enterprising. The Imperial censorship was a patchy phenomenon. Tight and intrusive in St Petersburg, it was slacker in Georgia and Finland. The harsh control over ideas in the Seminary was not replicated outside its walls. Although overtly nationalist works were picked out for attention, pieces on social, economic and historical themes were permitted to appear. Before the turn of the century, moreover, the chief perceived danger to the Romanovs was thought to come from those intellectuals who called for armed struggle, regional autonomy or even secession from the Russian Empire. Chavchavadze offered no direct challenge to the monarchy or the social order. But the Marxists too were deemed to be not unduly menacing since they appeared to be preoccupied with social and economic grievances; none of them demanded Georgian territorial autonomy, far less independence. The chief censor in Tbilisi, Giorgi Zhiruli, cheerfully admitted to his ignorance of Marxism. In such an environment it was possible to have a lively public debate. Marxists in Russia had to content themselves with thick journals published in St Petersburg and with intermittently appearing émigré newspapers.19 The debate for the soul of the Georgian nation was intense as conservatives, liberals and socialists contended with each other.

  Joseph Dzhughashvili was more confident than most first-year seminarists. He had begun to write his own verses, and quickly after arriving in Tbilisi he set about trying to get them published. His themes were nature, land and patriotism. Ilya Chavchavadze appreciated his talent. Joseph’s first printed poem, ‘To the Moon’, appeared in the magazine Iveria in June 1895. Giorgi Tsereteli’s Kvali was no less enthusiastic about his work, and Joseph — writing under pseudonyms such ‘I. Dzh-shvili’ and ‘Soselo’ to avoid detection by the Rector and the Inspector — had six poems published in 1895–6.20

  The poem ‘Morning’ was a touching work written in the romantic literary style then conventional in Georgian literary circles:21

  The pinkish bud has opened,

  Rushing to the pale-blue violet

  And, stirred by a light breeze,

  The lily of the valley has bent over the grass.

  The lark has sung in the dark blue,

  Flying higher than the clouds,

  And the sweet-sounding nightingale

  Has sung a song to children from the bushes

  Flower, oh my Georgia!

  Let peace reign in my native land!

  And may you, friends, make renowned

  Our Motherland by study!

  Nobody would claim that this in translation is high art; but in the Georgian original it has a linguistic purity recognised by all. The themes of nature and nation commended themselves to readers. The educationist Yakob Gogebashvili, who had contacts with revolutionaries in Tbilisi,22 valued the poem so highly that he included it in the later editions of his school textbook, Mother Tongue (deda ena).23

  There was a nationalist edge to Joseph’s poems even though he restrained himself in order to avoid annoying the Tbilisi censor. His images were those of many writers in the oppressed countries of Europe and Asia of that time: mountain, sky, eagle, motherland, songs, dreams and the solitary traveller. The closest he came to disclosing his political orientation was in an untitled work dedicated to ‘the poet and singer of peasant labour, Count Rapael Eristavi’. For Joseph, Eristavi had identified himself with the plight of the poor toilers of the Georgian countryside.24

  Not for nothing have the people glorified you,

  You will cross the threshold of the ages —

  Oh that my country might rise.

  Eristavi, born in 1824, was an ethnographer and folklorist as well as poet. His focus on the need for social and economic reform made him an unmistakable opponent of the status quo in the Russian Empire. According to one of Joseph’s fellow seminarists, the poem dedicated to Eristavi was interpreted as revolutionary in content.25 This may be an exaggeration. But Joseph was undeniably offering a work intended to criticise the status quo.

  The legend of a rejected Georgian youth was a figment of Stalin’s imagination. He was welcomed by the Georgian cultural elite. As soon as he left Gori, there was no going back except for holidays. Tbilisi offered the promise of realised ambition. His friends, whether they had come from rich or poor backgrounds, felt the same. They had an eagerness to make a mark in the world outside the town of their birth.

  Stalin later made out that he and his comrades crept into Chichinadze’s shop and, short of funds, surreptitiously copied out the forbidden texts into their notebooks. Supposedly they did this in relays to relieve the pain to their hands. A less likely situation is hard to imagine in a well-ordered enterprise. (Not that this has stopped biographers from taking the story at its face value.) Chichinadze was on the side of those who opposed the Russian establishment in Tbilisi. When the seminarists came on to his premises, he surely greeted them warmly; and if copying took place, it must have been with his express or implicit permission.26 The spread of ideas was more important to the metropolitan intellectual elite than mere profit. It was a battle the liberals could scarcely help winning. Chichinadze’s shop was a treasure house of the sort of books the youngsters wanted. Joseph Dzhughashvili was fond of Victor Hugo’s The Year Ninety-Three. He was punished for smuggling it into the Seminary; and when in November 1896 an inspection turned up Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea, Rector Germogen meted out a ‘lengthy stay’ in the solitary cell.27

  According to his friend Iremashvili, the group also got hold of texts by Marx, Darwin, Plekhanov and Lenin.28 Stalin told of this in 1938, claiming that each member paid five kopeks to borrow the first volume of Marx’s Capital for a fortnight.29 Much as they liked Ilya Chavchavadze and Giorgi Tsereteli, they were not in intellectual thrall to them. Some works by Marx and his followers were legally published in the Russian Empire. Others were passed secretly from hand to hand. The Orthodox Church had lost the contest to retain the loyalty of its livelier seminarists in the Georgian capital. The true struggle was among the various political and cultural trends outside the Seminary. Chavchavadze, a conservative reformer, hoped for a revival of national culture; Tsereteli, a radical liberal, aimed at basic socio-economic reform. By the 1890s, though, they were having to compete with advocates of diverse strands of socialism. Marxism was on the rise in Georgia and Joseph Dzhughashvili was already becoming attracted to its tenets.

  As his time in the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary drew to an end, Joseph had become thoroughly alienated from the authorities. He had ceased to study hard from his second year when he became involved in writing and publishing.30 He was also drawing back from the world of literature. Despite the patronage of Ilya Chavchavadze and Giorgi Tsereteli, he no longer sought to be a poet. He tossed aside the opportunity to join the Georgian cultural elite. Instead he intensified his studies of socialism, politics and economics. Having hurtled like a small meteor across the Tbilisi literary scene in 1895–6, he just as suddenly disappeared. It would appear that he entirely stopped composing poetry. Few people apart from his publishers and his close friends at the Seminary had an inkling that he had ever published any. (When Yakob Gogebashvili reprinted ‘Morning’ in 1912, it was under the original pseudonym.)31 Dzhughashvili searched for a different way of life from the kind offered either by the priesthood or Tbilisi literary circles. His alter ego as a rough-voiced militant from the depths of society was beginning to emerge; and as far as most people knew, this persona was the only Dzhughashvili who existed.

  He detested the disciplinary regime at the Seminary. On 28 September 1898 he was the centre of a group found to be reading prohibited material. Joseph had even taken notes on it.32 Inspector Abashidze, exasperated by infringements, reported:

  Dzhughashvili, Iosif (V.I.) in the course of a search of the possessions of certain fifth-year pupils spoke out several times to the inspectors, giving voice in his comments to discontent about the searches conducted from time to time among the seminarists. In one of them he asserted that such searches were not made in a single other seminary
. In general, pupil Dzhughashvili is rude and disrespectful towards persons in authority and systematically fails to bow to one of the teachers (A. A. Murakhovski), as the latter has frequently reported to the inspectors.

  Reprimanded. Confined to the cell for five hours by order of Father Rector.

  Joseph’s behaviour was almost asking for trouble and the Rector’s reaction aggravated the tension in the young man. It was only a matter of time before Joseph threw up his priestly vocation.

  He stuck it out almost to the end of the course. There were pragmatic reasons for this. A piece of paper attesting completion of the seminary training, even if he declined to enter the priesthood, would have given him the qualifications (if he had the necessary money) to become a student in one of the Russian Empire’s universities. But Joseph had no private source of income and had no connection with any organisation which might support him. He would have to make his living for himself from scratch. Consequently his disappearance from the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary in May 1899, as the last examinations were about to be sat, was an act of existential choice. He left no explanation of his decision to the authorities. In later years he pretended that he had been expelled for carrying out ‘Marxist propaganda’;33 but the reality was that he had left of his own accord. His was a wilful spirit. He had lost his religious faith and was beginning to discover a different way of interpreting the world in Marxism. He was also impulsive. Joseph Dzhughashvili had had enough: he left the priestly environment on his own terms. Always he wanted the world to function to his wishes. If he left a mess behind him, too bad. He had made his decision.

  He abhorred the Imperial authorities. He had national pride. In Tbilisi he responded to the intellectual effervescence of Georgian public life at the end of the nineteenth century. He already considered himself a man of outstanding ability. He had already shown his ambition by getting his poems published.

  The contours of Joseph’s later personality were already disclosing themselves. He was dedicated to self-improvement through daily study. His capacity for hard work, whenever he thought such work was useful, was immense. The Imperial order had given him a usefully wide education, albeit an education underpinned by Christian liturgy and tsarist loyalism. He was literate and numerate; he had a pleasing style in poetry. In his spare time he had started to acquaint himself with broader ideas about society and to study Marxist texts. He also read Russian and European classic novels. He was obviously capable of going on to university and had an acute analytical mind. His problem was what to do with his life. Having abandoned Christianity, he had no career ahead of him; and his family lacked the resources and desire to enable him to enter an alternative profession. For the next few years he was to expend much energy trying to decide the fundamental question for rebels in the Russian Empire: what is to be done? Another question also exercised his mind: with whom to do it? Young Dzhughashvili, fresh out of the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary, had yet to formulate his answers.

  5. MARXIST MILITANT

  Leaving the Seminary, Joseph Dzhughashvili had to find paid employment without delay. Gori held no attraction. Only Tbilisi offered serious opportunities and Joseph anyway wanted to combine work with revolutionary activity. For a while he eked out a living by giving private lessons;1 but on 28 December 1899 his friends helped to get him a job at the Physical Observatory in Mikhailovski Street. He worked there for three months. It was his only period of sustained employment until after the October Revolution. Joseph bought the Russian translation of Sir Norman Lockyer’s Astronomy, first published in 1874, for reference.2 His daily duties required him to record the temperature and weather four times. The only technical necessity was to read the magnetic tape, which he needed to sign each day before consigning it to the Observatory files.3

  He had been sleeping at the Observatory off and on since October when Vano Ketskhoveli — his school friend in Gori — started work there. By the end of the year M. Davitashvili, yet another Gori school friend and former seminarist, had joined them in the same single room.4 The cramped conditions were alleviated by the fact that Davitashvili often stayed with relatives in the city. Then in January 1900 Joseph and Vano were given a two-room flat on the ground floor overlooking the pleasant garden at the back of the building. Soon they had welcomed ex-seminarist V. Berdzenishvili as fellow tenant.5 All were hostile to the Imperial order and wanted revolutionary change. The flat became a meeting place for other dissenters. Mikhailovski Street was the busiest left-bank thoroughfare in Tbilisi so that friends could come and go without attracting suspicion. Among those who made contact was Vano Ketskhoveli’s elder brother Lado (who had been expelled from the Seminary in 1893).6 Joseph and Lado hit it off despite the difference in years. Both were strong-willed and ambitious. They were practical organisers in the making. It was a matter of time before they would want to move beyond their discussions in the Physical Observatory.

  Having repudiated the Seminary and its regulatory code, Joseph wanted to look the part of a tough, unsentimental revolutionary. His father had worked in a factory. So, too, had Joseph briefly: he needed no one to teach him the mores of the working class in the Russian Empire. Joseph refused to wear the typical three-piece suit of the Marxist theoretician:7

  [He] wore a plain black Russian shirt with a red cravat typical of all social-democrats. In winter he also put on a long brown overcoat. For headgear he wore only a Russian cap… One did not see him except in a rumpled shirt and unpolished shoes. Altogether he aimed to show that his mind was not a bourgeois one.

  His slovenliness signalled a deliberate rejection of ‘middle-class’ values. Yet at the same time there was a complication. The cut of his shirt was Russian but the fact that it was black marked him out as a Georgian. The national ambiguity reflected a will to live on his own terms. He wanted to appear ‘proletarian’ while also being taken for an ‘intellectual’. To workers he was a teacher and an organiser; to educated comrades he was an organiser and a potential pupil.

  Groups of Marxists in Tbilisi scrabbled around to obtain the political texts they needed. Works by Marx, Engels, Lassalle and Dickstein as well as Georgi Plekhanov and Alexander Bogdanov were carefully studied in the 1890s.8 Works on earlier generations of Russian revolutionaries, on the Paris Commune of 1871 and on the French Revolution were also examined.9 Among the Marxist groups was one led by Lev Rozenfeld and Suren Spandaryan. Rozenfeld was to become better known under his pseudonym Kamenev. Kamenev and Spandaryan would later become comrades of Dzhughashvili. Kamenev had been a pupil at the First Classical Gimnazia. His father was a leading engineer and entrepreneur who helped to construct the oil pipeline from Baku to Batumi. Confidently he gave talks on Marxist theory. Dzhughashvili attended one of them at the suggestion of his Gori friend Davrishevi and was impressed.10 It was a situation of historical irony: Kamenev, who played a part in attracting him to Marxism, was to be shot by Stalin’s political police (known at that time as the NKVD) in 1936. At any rate these ex-students of the Seminary and the Classical Gimnazia felt there was a world to be explored. Workers were at its analytical core but were not yet a fulcrum of Marxist activity.

  Although he was tied to the Observatory premises for long hours each day, Joseph’s tasks were hardly onerous; he could read what he wanted while he was on duty. It was a welcome change from the Seminary. He used his leisure productively. Among the recently published books he acquired was Alexander Bogdanov’s Short Course in Economic Science. Not all the works in his growing library were Marxist. Joseph also bought General Philosophy of the Soul by the mid-nineteenth-century exiled Russian aristocrat Alexander Herzen. Nor did he give up his interest in Georgian, Russian and European literature. But Marxism was at the centre of his plans for his future. He always did things with a definite purpose. In this case the purpose was clear. Joseph planned to revive his writing career with contributions to Marxist discussions in Georgia.

  The best among the possibilities for him at the turn of the century was the newspaper Kvali, which had been h
anded over to a surprised Noe Zhordania in 1898 (and which had published some of Dzhughash-vili’s poems before he abandoned literary ambition). Kvali made an impact on the Georgian intelligentsia with its critical analysis of social and economic conditions. The Caucasian office of the Imperial censorship took a gentle approach to Kvali, and Zhordania directly upbraided the chief censor when he objected to a particular issue of the news-paper.11 Yet it was Joseph Iremashvili, who like Dzhughashvili had declined to complete his priest’s training, who first offered an article to Kvali. Dzhughashvili congratulated his friend on his piece on the agrarian question.12 Meanwhile Iremashvili noted how hard Dzhughashvili was studying. On the table in the Observatory flat lay a pile of works by Plekhanov and Lenin (whose real name was Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov) — already Dzhughashvili was Lenin’s admirer.13 Dzhughashvili was not yet ready with something to say. He had become cautious. Instead he threw himself into propaganda activity among the workers of Tbilisi. This was the norm for Marxist intellectuals. While educating themselves through the works of Marx and Engels, they popularised Marxist ideas among railwaymen, shoemakers and textile-factory labourers. Dzhughashvili was given two workers’ circles to lead.14