Russia’s outward march, which overcame substantial resistance, transformed its ethnic and religious makeup. As late as 1719, Russia was perhaps 70 percent ethnic Great Russian (and more than 85 percent total Slav), but by the end of the following century Russians made up just 44 percent (Slavs around 73 percent); in other words, a majority of the population (56 percent) was other than Great Russian. Among the other Slavs, Little Russians (or Ukrainians) stood at 18 percent, Poles at 6 percent, and White Russians (or Belorussians) at 5 percent. There were smaller numbers of Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Finns, Germans, Georgians, Armenians, Tatars, Qalmyqs, and Siberian indigenes. In 1719, Russia had no Jews, but thanks to the late-eighteenth-century swallowing up of Poland, Jews would come to compose around 4 percent of the empire. They were legally confined (with exceptions) to the annexed territories in which they already lived—that is, old Poland-Lithuania and parts of western Ukraine, lands that constituted the Pale of Settlement.5 They were forbidden from owning land, rendering them more urban and more professional than the rest of Russia’s population. But for all the historical attention focused on Russia’s 5 million Jews, it was Russia’s Muslims, present going back to ancient Muscovy, who constituted the empire’s second largest religious grouping after Eastern Orthodox Christians. Imperial Russia’s Muslims had one of the realm’s highest birthrates, and would come to exceed 18 million people, more than 10 percent of the population. Many of Russia’s Muslims spoke a dialect of Persian, but most spoke Turkic languages, giving Russia several million more Turkic speakers than the “Turkish” Ottoman empire.
Russia’s territorial aggrandizement had often come at Ottoman expense, as in the conquest of the Caucasus. These formidable mountain redoubts, wedged between the Black and Caspian seas, were higher than the Alps, but on either side of the chain, adjacent to the seashores, could be found narrow, easily passable lowlands—paths to conquest. In the western parts of the Caucasus, Turkic long served as a lingua franca, reflecting Ottoman rule; in the eastern parts, it was Persian, reflecting Iranian rule. Troops loyal to the Russian tsar had first reached the Caspian Sea in 1556—for a time, Ivan the Terrible took a Caucasus Turkic princess as a wife—but the Russian empire did not manage to seize Baku, the main Caspian settlement, from the Persian shah until 1722.6 And it was not until the 1860s or so that generals in the Russian service managed to claim the entire uplands. In other words, the Russian advance into the Caucasus proceeded vertically, in essence a giant flanking maneuver around and then up the mountains that consumed more than 150 years and uncounted lives.7 In Dagestan (“the mountainous land”), a territory that resembled British India’s tribal northwest frontier, Russian counterinsurgency troops butchered entire indigenous villages to force them to give up suspected insurgents; the insurgents, for their part, directed vendettas against the indigenous Muslims, too, accused of cooperating with Russia. Also devastating were the axes of Slav peasant settlers, who moved into the steep yet fertile valleys and, to grow crops, removed the forest cover critical to the rebels. To top everything off, in the final drive to conquest in the 1860s and 70s, perhaps four hundred thousand of half a million highlander Circassians were driven or fled across the Ottoman border.8 These deportations and massacres, accompanied by Slavic peasant homesteading, facilitated Russia’s assimilation of the Caucasus, which is how the future Stalin would be born a subject of Russia.
All the ad hoc empire building—and there is no other kind—resulted in a jumble of contradictions. The so-called Old Believers, Eastern Orthodox Christians who refused to recognize the reformed Orthodox Church or the Russian state and had been banished or fled to the “remote” Caucasus, found they could survive only by supplying services to “the Antichrist,” that is, to the Russian imperial army. Even so, the empire’s Cossack shock troops, once free and wild frontiersmen who had become paladins of autocracy, remained chronically undersupplied and had to turn to the very mountaineers they were trying to subjugate in order to purchase weaponry. In turn, the antiempire mountaineers, with their picturesque cherkeskas—long woolen coats sporting rifle cartridges slotted across the chest—were recruited into the Retinue of the Tsar in St. Petersburg.9 Perhaps the greatest contradiction lay in the circumstance that the Russian empire had been implanted in the Caucasus largely by invitation: Georgia’s Christian rulers were battling both the Muslim Ottomans and the Muslim Safavids and invited Christian Russia’s protection. That “protection,” in practice, was effected by opportunistic imperial agents close to the scene, and soon took the form of annexations, in 1801 and 1810.10 Russia terminated the Georgian Bagrationi dynasty and replaced the patriarch of the formerly independent Georgian Orthodox Church with a Russian Orthodox Church metropolitan (called an exarch). And yet, in another contradiction, the local “Russian” administration overflowed with Georgians, who were favored as fellow Christians. Thanks to Russian rule, Georgian elites obtained powerful new instruments for imposing their will over the lower orders, and over the many other peoples in the Caucasus. Such is empire: a series of bargains empowering the ambitious.
Within the Russian empire, Georgia was its own imperial project.11 Of the 8.5 million inhabitants of the Caucasus enumerated in the late nineteenth century, about a third were Muslim, while one half were Eastern Orthodox, but of the latter only 1.35 million were ethnic Georgians (by language). This minority came to rule more than ever thanks to Russia. Of course, far from everything under Russian suzerainty was to Georgian liking. In 1840, imperial authorities in St. Petersburg decreed Russian as the sole language for official business in the Caucasus. This followed Russia’s suppression (in 1832) of a conspiracy to restore the Georgian monarchy (some Georgian nobles had planned to invite local Russian officials to a ball and murder them). Most of the conspirators were exiled elsewhere within the Russian empire, but soon they were allowed to return and resume careers in Russian state service: the empire needed them. A majority of Georgian elites would become and remain largely Russophile.12 At the same time, new infrastructure helped overcome barriers to tighter Russian incorporation. Between 1811 and 1864, a key military road was cut southward from the lowland settlement of Vladikavkaz (“rule the Caucasus”) up through the high mountain pass—above seemingly bottomless chasms—on to Tiflis, the capital. Before the century was out, the Transcaucasus Railway would link the Black and Caspian seas. Above all, career opportunities induced many Georgians to master the Russian language, the greatest element of imperial infrastructure. Georgians memorized and retold stories about Georgia’s heroic resistance to Russian conquest, but if they could, they also married into elite Russian families, indulged in Russian operas, and hankered after the peacock fan of imperial uniforms, titles, and medals along with the commodious state apartments, travel allowances, and cash “gifts.”13 What worked for elites became available on a lesser scale to the lower orders, who took advantage of the opportunities to go to new Russian-language schools in the Caucasus sponsored by the Russian Orthodox Church. Here, then, was the imperial scaffolding—conquest via Georgian collusion, Russification via the Orthodox Church—on which the future Stalin would climb.14
SMALL-TOWN IDYLL
The future Stalin’s hometown of Gori (“hill”), nestled in the rolling uplands of the Eastern Georgian valley of the Mtkvari River (Kura River, in Russian), had for centuries served as a caravan stop at the junction of three roads: one westward to the Black Sea, one eastward to the Caspian, and one northward through the Tskhinvali Pass to the steppe grasslands.15 Gori, in other words, was no boondocks. In the heart of town, atop its highest hill, stood the yellow crenellated walls of a thirteenth-century fortress. Additional ruins, the gardens of grandees from when Gori had been the capital of the Georgian state of Kartli in the seventeenth century, could be found outside town. Also not far away were the famed mineral waters of Borzhomi, where Alexander II’s brother, viceroy of the Caucasus, had erected a summer residence. In Gori proper, directly below the ancient fortress ruin, lay the Old Town.
A second district, the Central Quarter, boasted numerous Armenian and Georgian churches, while a third, housing the barracks of the imperial garrison, was christened the Russian Quarter.16 In 1871, this crossroads became a junction of the Russian empire railway that opened between Tiflis, the Caucasus capital, and Poti, a Black Sea port (conquered from the Ottomans in 1828). In the 1870s, Gori’s narrow, crooked, filthy streets were home to perhaps 7,000 inhabitants, of whom a slight majority was Armenian, the rest being Georgian, with a few hundred Russians as well as some Abkhaz and Ossetians, who had migrated from nearby tribal villages. Gori merchants traded with Iran, the Ottoman empire, and Europe. Thanks to its strong merchant presence, as well as to the Orthodox Church, Gori had four schools, including a solid two-story church school founded by church authorities in 1818, not long after Georgia’s incorporation into the Russian empire.17 The upshot was that whereas in Tiflis one in fifteen inhabitants attended school—versus one in thirty for the entire Caucasus—in Gori one in ten inhabitants were in school.18 For boys born on that “hill,” doors could open to the future.
The future Stalin’s father, Besarion Jughashvili (1850–1909), known as Vissarion in Russian and Beso for short, did not hail from Gori. His paternal grandfather (Zaza), a serf once arrested for his part in a peasant uprising, may have lived in a tribal Ossetian village; Beso’s father, Vano, also a serf, tended vines in a village called Didi Lilo (“Greater Lilo”), population under 500, where Beso was born. Vano would carry his grapes to nearby Tiflis, about ten miles away, but he died before the age of fifty. Soon thereafter, bandits killed Vano’s son Giorgi, an innkeeper, and Beso quit Didi Lilo to seek work in Tiflis, where he learned the shoemaker’s trade at an Armenian-owned shop. Beso spoke some Armenian, Azeri Turkish, and Russian, though it is unclear whether he could write in his native Georgian. Around 1870, when he was twenty, he relocated to Gori, evidently at the invitation of another Armenian entrepreneur, Baramyants (Russified as Iosif Baramov). The latter owned a shoe workshop that had been commissioned to supply the imperial garrison in Gori.19 The Russian empire was one far-flung garrison. By 1870, all of Siberia was secured by just 18,000 troops, but Kharkov, Odessa, and Kiev garrisoned 193,000 soldiers; Warsaw, another 126,000. At a time when British India counted 60,000 troops and 1,000 police, the Caucasus had 128,000 imperial soldiers. That made for a lot of feet needing boots. Baramyants hired a number of master artisans, including Beso, who seems to have enjoyed success and evidently was ambitious. Aided financially by “Prince” Yakobi “Yakov” Egnatashvili, a Gori wine grower, dukhan (pub) owner, and wrestling champion, Beso soon opened his own cobbler shop, becoming a self-standing artisan.20
Beso dispatched a matchmaker to win the hand of Ketevan “Keke” Geladze, said to be a slender, chestnut-haired teenage beauty with big eyes.21 She, too, was both the offspring of serfs and a striver. Her surname was common in southern Ossetia, leading to speculation that she also had Ossetian blood, but like Beso’s, her native tongue was Georgian. Keke’s father, a bricklayer and serf who gardened for a wealthy Armenian and lived in a village outside Gori, married another serf, but he seems to have passed away before (or right after) Keke was born. Unusually, Keke’s mother made sure the girl learned to read and write; at the time, very few Georgian females were literate. But Keke’s mother, too, died, and the girl was raised by her mother’s brother, also a serf. Serfdom in Georgia was extraordinary even by crazy-quilt imperial Russian standards: the leading Georgian nobles could own minor nobles as well as priests, while priests could own minor nobles. Partly that was because the tsarist state showed considerable deference to the expansive Georgian nobility, which accounted for 5.6 percent of Georgia’s population, versus 1.4 percent for nobles in the empire as a whole. Serfdom’s abolition in the Caucasus began three years later than in the rest of the Russian empire, in October 1864. That was about when Keke’s family relocated from the village to Gori. “What a happy journey it was!” she reminisced to an interviewer late in life. “Gori was festively decorated, crowds of people swelled like the sea.”22 The Geladzes were free, but they faced the challenge of making a new life.
Keke’s wedding to Beso, in May 1874 in Gori’s Cathedral of the Assumption, took place in the grand Georgian style, with a boisterous, ostentatious procession through the town.23 Yakov Egnatashvili, Beso’s benefactor, served as one of Beso’s best men. Father Kristopore Charkviani, another family friend, was said to have sung so beautifully at the ceremony that Prince Yakov tipped the priest the princely sum of 10 rubles. Beso, like most Georgians—literate or illiterate—could quote from Shota Rustaveli’s twelfth-century The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, an epic about three chivalrous friends who rescue a damsel from being forced into a marriage. Beso liked to wear a long Circassian blackcoat, cinched with a leather belt, over baggy trousers, which he tucked into leather boots—an epigone of Caucasus manhood. True, he was known to drink some of his shoemaker earnings; then again, as per local custom, his customers often paid him with homemade wine. For all his typical faults, though, Keke viewed the artisan as a step up. “He was considered a very popular young man among my friends and they were all dreaming of marrying him,” she recalled to the interviewer. “My friends nearly burst with jealousy. Beso was an enviable groom, a true Georgian knight, with beautiful mustaches, very well dressed—and with the special sophistication of the town dweller.” Beso, she added, could be “unusual, peculiar, and morose,” but also “clever and proud.” “Among my friends,” Keke concluded, “I became the desired and beautiful girl.”24
In December 1878, four years into the marriage, when Keke was around twenty and Beso twenty-eight, the couple had a son, Ioseb—the future Stalin.25 Ioseb was actually Beso and Keke’s third son, which by Georgian and Eastern Orthodox tradition was viewed as a special gift of God. But their prior children had not survived. Beso and Keke’s firstborn, Mikheil, had died in early 1876, age two months; their second (Giorgi) had died in June 1877, after about half a year.26 Ioseb, whose diminutive in Georgian was “Soso” (or “Soselo”), grew up an only child, learning later of his brothers’ ghosts. The three-person family rented a small timber-and-brick, single-room house from an Ossetian artisan. It was located in Gori’s Russian Quarter, near the barracks of the imperial troops whose footwear Beso made. A mere ninety square feet, the structure had a table and four stools, a plank bed, a samovar, a trunk, and a kerosene lamp. Clothes and other belongings were placed on open shelves. There was a cellar, however, reached by winding stairs, and it was here that Beso kept his tools and opened his workshop, and Keke made a nursery for Soso.27 Stalin’s life, in other words, began in a basement.
The humble circumstances notwithstanding, the Jughashvili family story had the makings of a small-town idyll: the artisan, the beauty, and the (surviving) boy. Keke is said to have never let him out of her sight.28 From around the age of two, Soso suffered the litany of childhood diseases (measles, scarlet fever), and Keke, fearful of losing yet another child, went to church frequently to pray. She also produced insufficient milk, so Soso had to suck the breasts of their neighbors: Mrs. Egnatashvili as well as neighbor Masho Abramidze-Tsikhitatrishvili. Still, he grew, and was full of life. “He was a stubborn little boy,” recalled Masho. “When his mother called him and he didn’t feel like responding, he didn’t stop playing.”29
GEOPOLITICAL RUPTURE, SURROGATE FAMILY SUCCOR
Running the streets of his Georgian hill town, little Soso was oblivious to the wider world, but in the same decade he was born, Germany had ostentatiously proclaimed the founding of the Second German Reich—the first had been the loose Holy Roman Empire—in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, where the great French Sun King Louis XIV had once received the many little German princes. Their geopolitical rupture of German unification and its follow-on rapid industrialization radically altered Russia’s geopolitical space. Less ostentatiously, but almost as consequentially, in Japan in 1868, a group of rebels overthrew the Tokugawa Shogunate in Edo (
Tokyo) and, as a way to legitimize their rebellion, nominally “restored” the dormant emperor, who took the name Meiji (enlightened rule). The process was by no means smooth, as major regions rebelled. But by 1872–73, nearly every important member of Japan’s new leadership had traveled in an embassy to Europe and America, seeing firsthand not only the marvels of the advanced world, but also seeing that the advanced world was not a monolith. Japan’s new leaders decided to take full advantage, adapting elements of each country separately: the centralized educational system of France appealed to them more than the looser American one, but instead of the French army, they eventually chose the German system of professional officers and a general staff, while opting for a British-style navy. “Knowledge,” proclaimed the Meiji emperor, “shall be sought throughout the world, and thereby shall be strengthened the foundation of the imperial polity.” This proclamation encapsulated the secret of great power ascendancy for the ages. To be sure, the new schools and other foreign imports were often resisted; it would take state power to force the transformation. Moreover, Japan’s follow-on industrialization did not match Germany’s. That said, Japan’s economy took off, too, and dramatically transformed the balance of power in Asia, as a new power rose on Russia’s other flank.
Also in the same decade the future Stalin was born, the United States of America had become the world’s largest integrated national economy. The United States had only recently descended into a civil war, which claimed 1 million casualties, including 600,000 dead out of a population of 32 million, while also introducing ironclad ships, overhead balloon reconnaissance, trench warfare, and long-range rifles. (The war cut off the German journalist Karl Marx’s freelance income from a New York Tribune no longer as interested in European affairs.) Contrary to Confederate hopes, however, the North’s mills were not dependent on the South’s supplies of raw cotton (growers in Egypt and India could make up the shortfalls). Some British statesmen, including William Gladstone, had cheered on the South, hoping for a diminution in U.S. power, but the British government never recognized the Confederacy’s independence. Had an independent agrarian nation been victorious and consolidated in the U.S. South—one of the largest slave systems in the modern world—the British would have been doomed in the twentieth century, and the entire course of world events would have been radically altered. In 1860, the value of Southern slaves was three times the amount invested in manufacturing or railroads, representing more capital than any other American asset except land, but instead of the slave-based, cotton-growing South, the industrial North triumphed. Between 1870 and 1900, the reunited U.S. economy industrialized and tripled in size (with assistance from mass immigration from non-English-speaking, non-Protestant societies), producing a spectacular surge that eclipsed even the booms in Germany and Japan as the U.S. share of global output soared to nearly 30 percent. This American economic colossus, despite American colonial wars in the Philippines and Cuba, remained as yet mostly apart from world politics. Still, U.S. power had begun to loom over the world system, and would prove decisive in it.
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