There was a prosaic side as well: To make ends meet, Keke cleaned the school (for 10 rubles a month). She may also have worked as a domestic at the home of the schoolmaster, though at some point she became a regular seamstress for a local “fancy” clothes shop and, finally, settled them into an apartment (on Gori’s Cathedral Street).67 But soon, for exemplary academic performance, Soso’s tuition was waived and on top of that he began receiving a monthly stipend of 3 rubles, later raised to 3.50 and then 7. This is perhaps the best evidence that the child from the broken home stood out as one of Gori’s best pupils.68 Graduating in spring 1894, at the advanced age of fifteen and a half, he could have gone on to the Gori Teachers Seminary, a further step up. An even better option presented itself: Choirmaster Simon Goglichidze was moving to the Tsar Alexander Teacher Training School in Tiflis and said he could bring his star Gori pupil along on a coveted fully funded state scholarship. That was no small matter for an indigent family. But instead, Soso sat the entrance examinations for the Theological Seminary in Tiflis, to become a priest. He excelled on the exams nearly across the board—Bible studies, Church Slavonic, Russian, catechism, Greek, geography, penmanship (though not in arithmetic)—and gained admission. It was a dream come true. The Tiflis seminary—alongside that city’s secular gymnasia (elite high schools) for the boys and girls of the prosperous—represented the highest rung of the educational ladder in the Caucasus, where the Russian imperial administration refused to countenance a university. The seminary’s six-year course of study (usually from age fourteen) led, at a minimum, to life as a parish priest or a village teacher in rural Georgia, but for those still more ambitious, the seminary could provide a stepping-stone to a university elsewhere in the empire.
In biography generally, the trope of the traumatic childhood—an outgrowth of the spread of Freudianism—came to play an outsized role.69 It is too pat, even for those with genuinely traumatic childhoods. The future Stalin’s childhood was certainly not easy: illnesses and accidents, forced house moving, straitened circumstances, a broken-down father, a loving but severe mother rumored to be a whore. But in adulthood, even as the dictator indulged roiling resentments that would seal the fate of most of his revolutionary colleagues, he would voice no special anger at his parents or his early life experiences. The future Kremlin leader experienced nothing of the bloody intrigues of the court childhoods of Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great (to both of whom he would often be compared). Ivan’s father died from a boil when the boy was three; his mother was assassinated when he was seven. The orphaned Tsar Ivan the Terrible was reduced (by his regents) to begging for his food, and he witnessed the elites’ murderous struggle for power in his name, coming to fear his own pending bloody demise. The young Ivan took to tearing off birds’ wings and throwing cats and dogs off buildings. Peter the Great’s father died when he was four. Thereafter, the boy’s life was under threat by the warring court factions that were connected to his father’s two widows. After Peter was made tsar at age ten, the losing faction rebelled, and the young Peter witnessed relatives of his mother and friends being thrown onto upraised pikes. To be sure, some analysts have exaggerated the horrors of Ivan’s and Peter’s childhoods, offering pseudopsychological explanations for their often cruel reigns. Still, the most that could be claimed about the young Jughashvili was that he might have seen his father once come after his mother with a knife.
Next to what Ivan and Peter had gone through, what were the future Stalin’s childhood tribulations? Consider further the early life of Sergei Kostrikov, known later under the revolutionary name Kirov, who would become Stalin’s closest friend. Born in 1886 in a small town in Vyatka province, central Russia, Kirov would be considered as among the most popular of Stalinist party leaders. But his childhood was difficult: four of Kirov’s seven siblings died in infancy, his father was a drunkard who abandoned the family, and his mother died of TB when the boy was just seven. Kirov grew up in an orphanage.70 A similar fate befell another key member of Stalin’s inner circle, Grigol “Sergo” Orjonikidze, whose mother died when he was an infant, and whose father died when he was ten. By contrast, the young Stalin had his doting mother and a variety of important mentors, as the strikingly numerous memoirs from that time indicate. Keke’s extended family lived close by, including her brother Gio and his children (Keke’s other brother, Sandala, would be killed by the tsarist police). And Beso’s family (his sister’s children) remained a presence even after Beso lost the custody showdown in 1890.71 Family was the glue of Georgian society, and Soso Jughashvili had not only his own extended kin, but the surrogate kin provided by the Egnatashvilis (as well as the Davrishevis). Smalltown Gori took care of its own, forming a tight-knit community.
In addition to his extended family and Gori schooling (a ticket upward), the future Stalin’s childhood had one more vital redeeming aspect: faith in God. His destitute family had to find the means for the Orthodox seminary’s hefty annual tuition (40 rubles) and room and board (100 rubles), as well as for his surplice school uniform. The sixteen-year-old Jughashvili petitioned for a scholarship and was granted a partial one: free room and board.72 For tuition, Keke appealed to Soso’s surrogate father, Koba Egnatashvili. Big Koba had the means to send his two surviving natural sons to a gymnasium in Moscow, and he came through for little Koba (Soso), too. But if the well-heeled Egnatashvili, or others, had ceased to support Soso, or if the Russian rector at the seminary withdrew the partial state scholarship, Jughashvili’s studies would have been jeopardized. He had taken a big risk by declining the full state scholarship at the secular teacher training school arranged by Choirmaster Goglichidze. The reason must have been that not only Keke but her son, too, was devout. “In his first years of study,” allowed a Soviet-era publication of reminiscences, “Stalin was very much a believer, going to all the services, singing in the church choir. . . . He not only observed all religious rites but always reminded us to observe them.”73 Studying among the monks at the seminary, the future Stalin may have thought to become a monk himself. But changes in the Russian empire and in the wider world opened up a very different path.74
CHAPTER 2
LADO’S DISCIPLE
Others live off our labor; they drink our blood; our oppression quenches their thirst with the tears of our wives, children, and kin.
Leaflets, in Georgian and Armenian, distributed by Iosif Jughashvili, 19021
TIFLIS EXUDED A HAUNTING, magical beauty. Founded in a gorge in the fifth century, the residence of Georgian kings from the sixth, Tiflis—its Persian name, also employed in Russian—was centuries older than ancient Kiev, let alone upstart Moscow or St. Petersburg. In Georgian the city was called Tblisi (“warm place”), perhaps for its fabled hot springs. (“I must not omit to mention,” enthused one nineteenth-century visitor, “that the baths of the city cannot be surpassed even by those of Constantinople.”)2 Back when Russia annexed eastern Georgia, in 1801, Tiflis had about 20,000 inhabitants, fully three quarters of them Armenian. By century’s end, Tiflis had mushroomed to 160,000, with a plurality of Armenians (38 percent), followed by Russians and Georgians, and a smattering of Persians and Turks.3 The city’s Armenian, Georgian, and Persian neighborhoods ascended up the hills, their houses terraced in, with multilevel balconies perched one above the other in a style reminiscent of the Ottoman Balkans or Salonika. By contrast, the flat Russian quarter stood out for its wide boulevards where one could find the imposing Viceroy’s Palace, Opera House, Classical Gymnasium No. 1, Russian Orthodox cathedral, and the private homes of Russian functionaries (chinovniki) and of the Armenian haute bourgeoisie. Imperial Russia’s 1860s Great Reforms had introduced municipal governing bodies with restricted franchise elections, and wealthy Armenians came to compose the vast majority of those eligible to vote in Tiflis’ municipal elections, allowing Armenian merchants to control the city duma. But they had no hold on the imperial executive administration, which was run by appointed Russians, ethnic Germans, and Poles, ofte
n relying on Georgian nobles, who enriched themselves through state office.4 Still, the Georgians—no more than a quarter of the urban population—were to an extent upstaged in their own capital.
The urban distribution of power was glaring. On the wide tree-lined Golovin Prospect, named for a Russian general, the shops carried signs in French, German, Persian, and Armenian as well as Russian. Wares on offer included fashions from Paris and silks from Bukhara, useful for marking status, as well as carpets from nearby Iran (Tabriz), which helped distinguish interior spaces. By contrast, over at the city’s labyrinthine Armenian and Persian bazaars, underneath the ruins of a Persian fortress, “everyone washes, shaves, gets a haircut, dresses and undresses as if at home in their bedroom,” explained a Russian-language guide to the warrens of silversmiths and cooking stalls serving kebabs and inexpensive wines.5 Tatar (Azeri) mullahs could be seen in their green and white turbans, while Persians went about in caftans and black-fur caps, their hair and fingernails dyed red.6 One observer described a typical square (Maidan), near where Soso Jughashvili had briefly resided with his father in 1890, as “a porridge of people and beasts, sheepskin caps and shaved heads, fezzes and peaked caps,” adding that “all shout, bang, laugh, swear, jostle, sing, work, and shake in various tongues and voices.”7 But beyond the Oriental riot of its streets—which made the guidebook writers ooh and aah—the years of the 1870s through 1900 saw a crucial transformation of society by the railroad and other industrialization, as well as a Georgian national awakening facilitated by an expanding periodical press and the connections from modern transportation. By 1900, Tiflis had acquired a small but significant intelligentsia and a growing industrial-worker class.8
It was in this modernizing urban milieu that Jughashvili—who was back in Tiflis as of 1894—entered the seminary and came of age, becoming not a priest but a Marxist and revolutionary.9 Imported to Georgia in the 1880s, Marxism seemed to offer a world of certainties. But Jughashvili did not discover Marxism on his own. A headstrong twentysomething militant, Vladimir “Lado” Ketskhoveli (b. 1876) would serve as the revolutionary mentor for the future Stalin, who in looking back would call himself a disciple of Lado.10 Lado was the fifth of six children born to a priest from a village just outside Gori. Three years Jughashvili’s senior at the Gori church school and then at the Tiflis Theological Seminary, Lado acquired tremendous authority among the seminarians. Under Lado’s influence, the young Jughashvili, already an energetic autodidact, found a lifelong calling in being an agitator and a teacher, helping the dark masses see the light about social injustice and a purported all-purpose remedy.
GEORGIAN CULTURAL NATIONALIST
Compared with small-town Gori, the Caucasus capital offered a grand drama of incipient modernity, but Iosif Jughashvili did not see much of the city, at least not initially. His immediate world, the theological seminary, was dubbed the Stone Sack—a four-story bastion of neoclassical façade. If the main classical gymnasium stood at the pinnacle of the local educational hierarchy, the seminary—more accessible to poor youth—was not far behind. The building, at the southern end of Golovin Prospect on Yerevan Square, had been purchased by the Orthodox Church from a sugar magnate (Constantine Zubalashvili) to serve as the new home of the seminary in 1873. For the hundreds of students who lived on the top floor in an open-style dormitory, their daily regime generally lasted from 7:00 a.m. until 10:00 p.m. Ringing bells summoned them to morning prayers, followed by tea (breakfast), classes until 2:00 p.m., a midday main meal at 3:00, then a mere hour or so outside the walls, roll call at 5:00, evening prayers, tea (a light supper) at 8:00, homework, and lights out. “Day and night we were worked within barrack walls and felt like prisoners,” recalled another Gori “Soso,” Ioseb Iremashvili, who like the young Stalin was attending the seminary by way of the Gori church school.11 Occasional leaves were granted to return to one’s native village or town, but otherwise Sundays alone afforded some free time—but only after Orthodox Church services, which meant standing for three to four hours on stone tiles. Trips to the theater and other blasphemies were proscribed. Some seminarians, however, dared to escape to town after nightly roll call, despite the random night dormitory checks to ferret out reading of illicit materials by candlelight or onanism.
The regimentation for the teenage seminarians accustomed to indulgent families and the free play of the streets had to be frustrating, but the seminary also offered endless opportunity for passionate discussions with fellow students about the meaning of existence and their own futures, as well as the discovery of books and learning. Emphasis fell on sacred texts, of course, and on Church Slavonic and Russian imperial history. Ioseb “Soso” Jughashvili, now known in Russified form as Iosif, was in his element, and he performed well. He became the school choir’s lead tenor, a high-profile achievement, given how much time the boys spent in church and preparing for church. He also developed into a voracious reader who started keeping a notebook of thoughts and ideas. In the classroom, he earned mostly grades of 4 (B), while achieving 5s (A’s) in ecclesiastical singing, and earned 5 rubles for occasional singing in the Opera House. In the beginning years his only 3s (C’s) came in final composition and Greek. He received the top mark (5) in conduct. As a freshman, Jughashvili placed eighth in a group of twenty-nine, and as a sophomore he rose to fifth. But in his third year, 1896-97, his rank slipped to sixteenth (of twenty-four), and by the fifth year he stood twentieth (of twenty-three), having failed scripture.12 Because classroom seating was determined by academic results, his desk kept being moved farther from the teachers. Even the choir he loved so much ceased to hold his interest, partly because of recurrent lung problems (chronic pneumonia).13 But the main cause of his declining interest and performance stemmed from a culture clash brought on by modernizing forces and political reactions.
In 1879, the year after Jughashvili had been born, two Georgian noblemen writers, Prince Ilya Chavchavadze (b. 1837) and Prince Akaki Tsereteli (b. 1840), had founded the Society for the Spread of Literacy Among Georgians. Georgians comprised many different groups—Kakhetis, Kartlians, Imeretians, Mingrelians—with a shared language, and Chavchavadze and Tsereteli hoped to spark an integrated Georgian cultural rebirth through schools, libraries, and bookshops. Their conservative populist cultural program intended no disloyalty to the empire.14 But in the Russian empire, administratively, there was no “Georgia,” just the two provinces (gubernias) of Tiflis and Kutaisi, and such was the hard-line stance of the imperial authorities that the censors forbade any publication of the term “Georgia” (Gruziya) in Russian. Partly because many censors did not know the Georgian language—which was written neither in Cyrillic nor Latin letters—the censors proved more lenient with Georgian publications, which opened a lot of space for Georgian periodicals. But at the Tiflis seminary, to compel Russification, Georgian language instruction had been abolished in favor of Russian in 1872. (Orthodox services in Georgia were conducted in Church Slavonic and thus were largely unintelligible to the faithful, as they were even in the predominantly ethnic Russian provinces of the empire.) From 1875, the seminary in the Georgian capital ceased teaching Georgian history. Of the seminary’s two dozen teachers, all of whom were formally appointed by the Russian viceroy, a few were Georgian but most were Russian monks, and the latter had been expressly assigned to Georgia because of their strong Russian nationalist views. (Several would later join radical-right movements.) In addition, the seminary employed two full-time inspectors to keep the students under “constant and unremitting supervision”—even in the seminarians’ free time—while recruiting snitches for extra eyes and ears.15
Expulsions for “unreliability” became commonplace, defeating the educational purpose of the seminary. In response to the heavy-handedness, Tiflis seminarians—many of them the sons of Orthodox priests—had begun (in the 1870s) to produce illegal newsletters and form secret discussion “circles.” In 1884, a member of one such Tiflis seminary circle, Silibistro “Silva” Jibladze (
who had led a revolt back in his junior seminary), struck the Russian rector in the face for denigrating Georgian as “dogspeak.” As the boys well knew, the kingdom of Georgia had converted to the Christian faith half a millennium before the Russians did, and more than a century before the Romans. Jibladze was sentenced to three years in a punishment battalion. Then, in 1886, to empirewide notoriety, a different expelled student assassinated the Tiflis seminary rector using a traditional Caucasus dagger (kinjal).16 More than sixty seminarians were expelled. “Some go so far as to excuse the assassin,” reported the exarch of Georgia to the Holy Synod in St. Petersburg. “All in their hearts approve.”17 By the 1890s, the seminary students were staging strikes. In a boycott of classes in November 1893, they demanded better food (especially during Lent), an end to the brutal surveillance regime, a department of Georgian language, and the right to sing hymns in Georgian.18 The Russifying ecclesiastics responded by expelling eighty-seven students—including the strike’s seventeen-year-old leader, Lado Ketskhoveli—and shutting the doors in December 1893.19 The seminary reopened in fall 1894 with two first-year classes, the 1893 and the 1894 admissions, the latter being Iosif Jughashvili’s.
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