Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  When the future Stalin started at the seminary, the harsh disciplinary mechanisms remained, but in a concession, courses in Georgian literature and history were reinstituted. In summer 1895, after his first year, Jughashvili, then sixteen and a half, took his own Georgian-language verses in person to the publishing nobleman Ilya Chavchavadze, without seminary permission. The editor of Chavchavadze’s newspaper Iveria (a term for Eastern Georgia) published five of Jughashvili’s poems, under the widely used Georgian nickname for Ioseb/Iosif: Soselo.20 The verses, among other themes, depict the contrast between violence (in nature and man) and gentleness (in birds and music), as well as a wandering poet who is poisoned by his own people. Another poem served as a contribution to the fiftieth jubilee of the Georgian nobleman Prince Rapiel Eristavi, the young Stalin’s favorite poet.21 Eristavi’s verses, the dictator would later say, were “beautiful, emotional, and musical,” adding that the prince was rightly called the nightingale of Georgia—a role to which Jughashvili himself might have aspired. An affectionate sixth Jughashvili poem, “Old Ninika,” published in 1896 in Kvali (The Furrow), the journal of another Tsereteli, Giorgi (b. 1842), featured a heroic sage narrating “the past to his children’s children.” In a word, Jughashvili, too, was swept up in the emotional wave of the fin-de-siecle Georgian awakening.

  The spirit of the times that affected the young Jughashvili was well captured in the poem “Suliko” (1895), or “Little Soul,” about lost love and lost national spirit. Written by Akaki Tsereteli, the cofounder of the Georgian Society, “Suliko” was set to music and became a popular anthem:

  In vain I sought my loved one’s grave;

  Despair plunged me in deepest woe.

  Overwhelmed with bursting sobs I cried:

  “Where are you, my Suliko?”

  In solitude upon a thornbush

  A rose in loveliness did grow;

  With downcast eyes I softly asked:

  “Isn’t that you, Oh Suliko?”

  The flower trembled in assent

  As low it bent its lovely head;

  Upon its blushing cheek there shone

  Tears that the morning skies had shed.22

  As dictator, Stalin would sing “Suliko” often, in Georgian and Russian translation (in which form it would become a sentimental staple on Soviet radio). But in 1895–96, he had to conceal his own Georgian-language poetry publishing triumph from the Russifying seminary authorities.

  Nationalism, of course, marked the age. Adolf Hitler, who had been born in 1889 near Brannau am Inn, in Austria-Hungary, was influenced by the shimmer of Bismarck’s German Reich almost from birth. Hitler’s father, Alois, a passionate German nationalist of Austrian citizenship, worked as a customs official in the border towns on the Austrian side; his mother, Klara, her husband’s third wife, was devoted to Adolf, one of only two of their five children to survive. Hitler moved with his family across the border, at age three, to Passau, Germany, where he learned to speak German in the lower Bavarian dialect. In 1894, the family moved back to Austria (near Linz), but Hitler, despite having been born and spending most of his formative years in the Habsburg empire, never acquired the distinctive Austrian version of German language. He would develop a disdain for polyglot Austria-Hungary and, with his Austrian-German speaking friends, sing the German anthem “Deutschland uber Alles”; the boys greeted each other with the German “Heil” rather than the Austrian “Servus.” Hitler attended church, sang in the choir, and, under his mother’s influence, spoke about becoming a Catholic priest, but mostly he grew up imagining himself becoming an artist. An elder brother’s death at age sixteen from measles (in 1900) appears to have severely affected Hitler, making him more moody, withdrawn, indolent. His father, who wanted the boy to follow in his footsteps as a customs official, sent him against his wishes to technical school in Linz, where Hitler clashed with his teachers. After his father’s sudden death (January 1903), Hitler’s performance in school suffered and his mother allowed him to transfer. Hitler would graduate (barely) and in 1905 move to Vienna, where he would fail to get into art school and lead a bohemian existence, jobless, selling watercolors and running through his small inheritance. The German nationalism, however, would stick. By contrast, the future Stalin would exchange his nationalism, that of the small nation of Georgia, for grander horizons.

  STUDENT POLITICS

  “If he was pleased about something,” recalled a onetime close classmate, Peti Kapanadze, of Jughashvili, he “would snap his fingers, yell loudly, and jump around on one leg.”23 In the fall of his third year (1896), when his grades would start to decline, Jughashvili joined a clandestine student “circle” led by the upperclassman Seid Devdariani. Their conspiracy may have been aided partly by chance: along with others of weak health, Jughashvili had been placed outside the main dormitory in separate living quarters, where he evidently met Devdariani.24 Their group had perhaps ten members, several from Gori, and they read non-religious literature such as belles lettres and natural science—books not even banned by the Russian authorities but banned at the seminary, whose curriculum excluded Tolstoy, Lermontov, Chekhov, Gogol, and even works of the messianic Dostoyevsky.25 The boys obtained the secular books from the so-called Cheap Library run by Chavchavadze’s Georgian Literacy Society, or from a Georgian-owned secondhand bookshop. Jughashvili also acquired such books from a stall back in Gori operated by a member of Chavchavadze’s society. (The future Stalin, recalled the bookseller, “joked a lot, telling funny tales of seminary life.”)26 As at almost every school across the Russian empire, student conspirators smuggled in the works to be read surreptitiously at night, concealing them during the day. In November 1896, the seminary inspector confiscated from Jughashvili a translation of Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea, having already found him with Hugo’s Ninety-Three (about the counterrevolution in France). Jughashvili also read Zola, Balzac, and Thackeray in Russian translation, and countless works by Georgian authors. In March 1897, he was caught yet again with contraband literature: a translation of a work by a French Darwinist that contradicted Orthodox theology.27

  The monks at the seminary, unlike most Russian Orthodox priests, led a celibate existence, forswore meat, and prayed constantly, struggling to avoid the temptations of this world. But no matter their personal sacrifices, dedication, or academic degrees, to the Georgian students, they came across as “despots, capricious egotists who had in mind only their own prospects,” especially rising to bishop (a status in the Orthodox tradition linked to the apostles). Jughashvili, for his part, might well have lost his interest in holy matters as a matter of course, but the seminary’s policies and the monks’ behavior accelerated his disenchantment, while also affording him a certain determination in resistance. He appears to have been singled out by a newly promoted seminary inspector, Priestmonk Dmitry, who was derided by the students as the “Black Blob” (chernoe piatno). The rotund, dark-robed Dmitry had been the seminary’s teacher of holy scripture (1896) before becoming an inspector (1898). Even though he was a Georgian nobleman whose secular name was David Abashidze (1867–1943), he showed himself to be even more Georgia phobic than the chauvinist ethnic Russian monks. When Abashidze confronted Jughashvili over possession of forbidden books, the latter denounced the seminary surveillance regime, called him a Black Blob, and got five hours in a dark “isolation cell.”28 Later in life, during his dictatorship, Stalin would vividly recall the seminary’s “spying, penetrating into the soul, humiliation.” “At 9:00 am, the bell for tea,” he explained, “we go into the dining hall, and then return to our rooms, and it turns out that during that interval someone has searched and turned over all our storage trunks.”29

  The estrangement process was gradual, and never total, but the seminary that Jughashvili had worked so hard to get into was alienating him. The illicit reading circle to which he belonged had not been revolutionary in intent, at first. And yet rather than accommodate and moderate student curios
ity, for what was after all the best belles lettres and modern science, the theologians responded with interdiction and persecution, as if they had something to fear. In other words, it was less the circle than the seminary itself that was fomenting radicalism, albeit unwittingly. Trotsky, in his biography of Stalin, would colorfully write that Russia’s seminaries were “notorious for the horrifying savagery of their customs, medieval pedagogy, and the law of the fist.”30 True enough, but too pat. Many, perhaps most, graduates of Russian Orthodox seminaries became priests. And while it was true that almost all the leading lights of Georgia’s Social Democrats emerged from the Tiflis seminary—like the many radical members of the Jewish Labor Federation (Bund) produced at the famed Rabbinical School and Teachers’ Seminary in Wilno—that was partly because such places provided an education and strong dose of self-discipline.31 Seminarians populated the ranks of imperial Russia’s scientists (such as the physiologist Ivan Pavlov, of dog reflex fame), and the sons and grandsons of priests also became scientists (such as Dimitri Mendeleev, who invented the periodic table). Orthodox churchmen gave the entire Russian empire most of its intelligentsia through both their offspring and their teaching. Churchmen imparted values that endured their sons’ or students’ secularization: namely, hard work, dignified poverty, devotion to others, and above all, a sense of moral superiority.32

  Jughashvili’s discovery of inconsistencies in the Bible, his poring over a translation of Ernest Renan’s atheistic Life of Jesus, and his abandonment of the priesthood did not automatically mean he would become a revolutionary. Revolution was not a default position. Another major step was required. In his case, he spent the 1897 summer vacation in the home village of his close friend Mikheil “Mikho” Davitashvili, “where he got to know the life of the peasants.”33 In Georgia, as in the rest of the Russian empire, the flawed serf emancipation had done little for the peasants, who found themselves trapped between land “redemption” payments to their former masters and newly uninhibited bandits who descended from mountain redoubts to exact tribute.34 The emancipation did “liberate” the children of the nobility, who, without serfs to manage, quit their estates for the cities and, alongside peasant youth, took up the peasantry’s cause.35 Jughashvili’s Georgian awakening evolved toward recognition of Georgian landlord oppression of Georgian peasants: the boy who had perhaps wanted to become a monk now “wished to become a village scribe” or elder.36 But his sense of violated social justice linked up with what appears to be his ambition for leadership. In the illegal circle at the seminary, Jughashvili and the elder Devdariani were boon companions but also competitors for top position.37 In May 1898, when Devdariani graduated and left for the Russian empire’s Dorpat (Yurev) University in the Baltic region, Jughashvili got his wish, taking over the circle and driving it in a more practical (political) direction.38

  Iosif Iremashvili—the other Gori “Soso” at the seminary—recalled that “as a child and youth he [Jughashvili] was a good friend so long as one submitted to his imperious will.”39 And yet it was right around this time that the “imperious” Jughashvili acquired a transformative mentor—Lado Ketskhoveli. Lado, after his expulsion for leading the student strike in 1893, had spent the summer reporting for Chavchavadze’s newspaper Iveria on postemancipation peasant burdens in his native Gori district; after that, as per regulations, Lado was permitted to enroll in a different seminary, which he did (Kiev) in September 1894. In 1896, however, Lado was expelled from Kiev, too, arrested for possession of “criminal” literature, and deported to his native village under police surveillance. In fall 1897, Lado returned to Tiflis, joined a group of Georgian Marxists, and went to work in a printer’s shop to learn typesetting so he could produce revolutionary leaflets.40 He also reestablished contact with the Tiflis seminarians. Ketskhoveli was a recognized authority among them: his photograph hung on the wall of the seminarian Jughashvili’s room (along with photos of Mikho Davitashvili and Peti Kapanadze).41 Even though the Cheap Library of Chavchavadze’s Georgian Literacy Society might have had a few Marxist texts, including perhaps one by Marx himself (A Critique of Political Economy, part of the Das Kapital trilogy), book-wise Tiflis was a far cry from Warsaw.42 Lado, beginning in 1898, served as the main source of the young Stalin’s transition from the typical social-justice orientation known as Populism to Marxism.43

  MARXISM AND RUSSIA

  Karl Marx (1818–83), born to a well-off middle-class family in Prussia, was by no means the first modern socialist. “Socialism” (the neologism) dates from the 1830s and appeared around the same time as “liberalism,” “conservatism,” “feminism,” and many other “isms” in the wake of the French Revolution that began in 1789 and the concurrent spread of markets. One of the first avowed socialists was a cotton baron, Robert Owen (1771–1858), who wanted to create a model community for his employees by paying higher wages, reducing hours, building schools and company housing, and correcting vice and drunkenness—a fatherlike approach toward “his” workers. Other early socialists, especially French ones, dreamed of an entirely new society, not just ameliorating social conditions. The nobleman Count Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) and his followers called for social engineers under public, not private, property, to perfect society, making it fraternal, rational, and just, in an updated version of Plato’s Republic. Charles Fourier (1772–1837) introduced a further twist, arguing that labor was the center of existence and should be uplifting, not dehumanizing; to that end, Fourier, too, imagined a centrally regulated society.44 Not all radicals embraced centralized authority, however: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65) attacked the banking system, claiming that big bankers refused to grant credit to small property owners or the poor, and advocated for society to be organized instead on the basis of cooperation (mutualism) so that the state would become unnecessary. He called his smaller-scale and cooperative approach anarchism. But Marx, along with his close collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820–95), a British factory owner, argued that socialism was not a choice but “the necessary outcome” of a larger historical struggle governed by scientific laws, so that, like it or not, the-then current epoch was doomed.

  Many adherents of conservatism, too, denounced the evils of markets, but what made Marx stand out among the foes of the new economic order was his full-throated celebration of the power of capitalism and modern industry. Adam Smith’s Scottish Enlightenment tome, Wealth of Nations (1776), had put forth influential arguments about competition, specialization (the division of labor), and the power of self-interest to increase social betterment. But in The Communist Manifesto (1848), a crisply written pamphlet, the-then twenty-nine-year-old Marx waxed lyrical about how “steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production” and how “the need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe.”45 These breakthroughs to “giant modern industry” and globalism, described by Marx in 1848 as accomplished facts, remained decades away, even in Britain, despite the industrial transformation there during Marx’s German childhood. But Marx anticipated them. When explicitly looking into the future, Marx, unlike Smith, stipulated that global capitalism would lose its dynamism. In 1867, he published the first volume of what would become the trilogy called Das Kapital, responding to the classical British political economist David Ricardo as well as Smith. Marx posited that all value was created by human labor, and that the owners of the means of production confiscated the “surplus value” of laborers. In other words, “capital” was someone else’s appropriated labor. The proprietors, Marx argued, invested their ill-gotten surplus value (capital) in labor-saving machinery, thereby advancing production and overall wealth, but also reducing wages or eliminating jobs; while the laborers, according to Marx, became locked in immiseration, capital tended to become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, inhibiting further development. In the interest of further economic and social progress, Marx called for abolition of private property, the market, profit, and money.

>   Marx’s revision of French socialist thought (Fourier, Saint-Simon) and British political economy (Ricardo, Smith) rested on what the German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had called the dialectic: that is, on a supposedly in-built logic of contradictions whereby forms clashed with their opposites, so that historical progress was achieved through negation and transcendence (Aufhebung). Thus, capitalism, because of its inherent contradictions, would give way, dialectically, to socialism. More broadly, Marx argued that history proceeded in stages—feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and communism (when everything would be plentiful)—and that the decisive motor was classes, such as the proletariat, who would push aside capitalism, just as the bourgeoisie had supposedly pushed aside feudalism and feudal lords. The proletariat in Marx became the bearer of Hegel’s universal Reason, a supposed “universal class because its sufferings are universal”—in other words, not because it worked in factories per se, but because the proletariat was a victim, a victim turned redeemer.

  Marx intended his analysis of society to serve as the leading edge in efforts to change it. In 1864, he joined with a diverse group of influential leftists in London, including anarchists, to establish a transnational body for uniting the workers and radicals of the world called the International Workingmen’s Association (1864–76). By the 1870s, critics on the left had attacked Marx’s vision for the organization—to “centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class”—as authoritarian, provoking recriminations and splits. After Marx’s death in 1883 in London (where he was buried), various socialist and labor parties founded a “Second International” in Paris (1889). In place of the “bourgeois-republican” “Marseillaise” of the 1789 French Revolution, the Second International adopted “L’Internationale”—the first stanza of which begins “Arise, ye wretched of the earth”—as the socialist anthem. The Second International also adopted the red flag, which had appeared in France as a stark contrast to the white flag of the Bourbon dynasty and of the counterrevolutionaries who wanted to restore the monarchy after its overthrow. Despite the French song and symbolism, however, German Social Democrats—devotees of the deceased Marx—came to dominate the Second International. Subjects of the Russian empire, many of them in European exile, would become the chief rivals to the Germans in the Second International.