In imperial Russia, the idea of socialism had taken hold nearly a half century before a proletariat had appeared and owed its phenomenal spread to the introspection of a self-described intelligentsia. The latter—literally, the intelligence of the realm—were educated yet frustrated individuals who initially came from the gentry, but over time also emerged from commoners granted access to high schools and universities. Russia’s intelligentsia absorbed the same German idealist philosophy that Marx had, only without the heavy materialism that came from British political economy. Organized in small circles (Russian kruzhok, German Kreis), Russian socialists defended the dignity of all by generalizing from a sense of their own violated dignity. Alexander Herzen and Mikhail Bakunin, two mid-nineteenth-century sons of great privilege who knew each other, led the way. Each believed that in Russia the peasantry could serve as the basis for socialism because of the institution of the commune.46 Communes furnished a collective buffer against frosts, droughts, and other challenges through periodic redistribution among households of land allotments (in separated strips) as well as other means.47 Many peasants did not live under the commune, especially in the east (Siberia) as well as the west and south (Ukraine), where there had been no serfdom. But in the central regions of the Russian empire, the commune’s powers were strengthened by the 1860s serf emancipation.48 Because peasants in communes held no private property as individuals—either before or after emancipation—thinkers such as Herzen and Bakunin imagined the empire’s peasants to be inherently socialist and therefore, they argued, in Russia socialism could appear essentially before capitalism. Armed with just such thinking in the aftermath of the 1860s serf emancipation, self-described Populists (narodniki), descended upon Russia’s villages to lift peasants out of backwardness.
The Populists were in a hurry: capitalism had begun to spread and the Populists feared that the freed serfs were being turned into wage slaves, with the exploitative bourgeoisie taking the place of serf owners. At the same time, the much idealized egalitarianism of village life was thought to be under threat by the appearance of the kulak, or rich peasant.49 But even poor peasants met the outside would-be tutors with hostility. After Populism’s tactic of agitation failed to foster mass peasant uprising, some turned to political terror to spark mass uprising in cities (which would also fail). Other radicals, however, shifted their hopes from peasants to the incipient proletariat, thanks to the growing influence of Marx in Russia. Georgi Plekhanov (b. 1857), the father of Marxism in Russia, attacked the Populist argument that Russia could obviate capitalism because it possessed some supposed indigenous tendency (the peasant commune) toward socialism. Plekhanov went into European exile in 1880 (for what would turn out to be thirty-seven years), but his works in the 1880s—Socialism and Political Struggle (1883) and Our Differences (1885)—filtered back into Russia and made the case that historical stages could not be skipped: Only capitalism made socialism possible, and therefore Russia, too, would have to have a “bourgeois revolution” first, before a socialist revolution, even if the proletariat had to help the bourgeoisie achieve the bourgeois revolution.50 This was what Marx had said. Late in life, though, Marx did seem to admit that England’s experience, from which he had generalized, might not be universal; that the bourgeoisie might not be uniquely progressive (in historical terms); and that Russia might be able to avoid the full-blown capitalist stage.51 This apparent heresy had emerged from Marx’s reliance on the Russian economist Nikolai F. Danielson, who served as his confidant and supplied him with books on Russia. Still, the late Marx’s quasi-Populist views on Russia were not widely known (they would not appear in Russian until December 1924). Plekhanov’s Marxist critique of Populism held intellectual sway.
Danielson himself fed this dominance by collaborating on a Russian translation of Das Kapital, Marx’s three-volume magnum opus, which appeared in the 1890s and attracted a fair audience of readers—including the future Stalin. In 1896, with publication of the third volume, the hesitant Russian censor finally recognized it as a “scientific” work, meaning it could circulate in libraries and be offered for sale.52 By this time, Marxist political economy had appeared as an academic subject at some Russian universities, and even the turn-of-the-century director of one of the empire’s largest textile plants in Moscow collected a vast trove of Marxiana.53 Russia was then a country of 1 million proletarians and more than 80 million peasants. But Marxism displaced Populism as “the answer.”
Marxism had spread to the Russian-controlled Caucasus as well, also beginning in the 1880s. It came partly from the leftist movements in Europe, via Russia, but also from the ferment in Russian Poland, whose influence reached Georgia through Poles sent into exile in the Caucasus or Georgians who studied in tsarist Poland. Georgian Marxism was also spurred by generational revolt. Noe Jordania emerged as the Plekhanov of the Caucasus. He had been born in 1869 into a noble family of western Georgia, attended the Tiflis Theological Seminary, and along with others like Silva Jibladze, the Tiflis seminarian who had slapped the Russian rector’s face in 1884, established the Third Group (Mesame Dasi) in 1892. They aimed to contrast their avowedly Marxist association with the conservative Populism of Ilya Chavchavadze (First Group) and the national (classical) liberalism of Giorgi Tsereteli (Second Group). Traveling in Europe, Jordania had come to know Karl Kautsky, the Prague-born leading German Social Democrat, as well as Plekhanov. In 1898, at the invitation of Giorgi Tsereteli, Jordania took over the editorship of the periodical Kvali.54 Under him, Kvali became the Russian empire’s first legal Marxist periodical, stressing self-government, development, and Georgian cultural autonomy within Russian borders (reminiscent of the Austrian Social Democrats in the multinational Habsburg realm). Before long, Marxist literature—including 100 mimeographed copies of The Communist Manifesto translated from Russian into Georgian—would be smuggled into Tiflis and bolster the widening circles of young Caucasus radicals such as Jughashvili.55
Tiflis became their organizing laboratory. The city of petty traders, porters, and artisans, surrounded by a restive countryside, had 9,000 registered craftsmen, mostly in one- and two-person artels. Around 95 percent of its “factories” were workshops with fewer than ten laborers. But the big railroad depots and workshops (which had opened in 1883), together with several industrial tobacco plants and the Adelkhanov Tannery, did assemble a proletariat of at least 3,000 (up to 12,500 in the province as a whole). Tiflis railway workers had walked off the job in 1887 and 1889, and in mid-December 1898 they did so again, for five days—a major strike that Lado Ketskhoveli and other workers organized. Jughashvili was in the seminary during that Monday-to-Saturday workweek job action.56 But thanks to Ketskhoveli, Jughashvili’s seminary student circle—which he had just come to control by May 1898—broadened to include half a dozen or so proletarians at the Tiflis railway depot and workshops. They usually met on Sundays, in Tiflis’ Nakhalovka (Nadzaladevi) neighborhood, which was bereft of sidewalks, streetlights, sewers, or running water.57 Jughashvili lectured workers on “the mechanics of the capitalist system,” and “the need to engage in political struggle to improve the workers’ position.”58 Through Lado, he met the firebrand Silva Jibladze, who seems to have played a role in teaching Jughashvili how to agitate among the workers and in assigning him new “circles.”59 Jibladze may also have been the person to introduce Jughashvili to Noe Jordania.
Sometime in 1898, Jughashvili went to call upon Jordania at Kvali, just as Jughashvili had once approached the aristocrat Chavchavadze at the periodical Iveria (which then published his poetry). Gentle and professorial, the aristocrat Jordania, who projected little of a radical countenance, later recalled that his brash young visitor told him, “I have decided to quit the seminary to propagate your ideas among the workers.” Jordania claims he quizzed the young Jughashvili on politics and society, then advised him to return to the seminary and to study Marxism more. The condescending advice was not well received. “I’ll think about it,” the future Stalin
is said to have replied.60 In August 1898, Jughashvili did join the Third Group of Georgian Marxists, following in Lado Ketskhoveli’s footsteps.
The Third Group, technically, was not a political party, which were illegal in tsarist Russia, but in March 1898, in a private log house in the outskirts of Minsk, a small town in the empire’s Pale of Settlement, a founding “congress” of the Marxist-inspired, German copycat Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDRP)—the future ruling party of the Soviet Union—took place. This was the second attempt (a previous effort to found the party, in Kiev, had failed). The Jewish Labor Bund (or Federation), which had been established five months earlier, provided logistical support for the Minsk gathering. There were a mere nine attendees, and just one actual worker (leading some present to object to their prospective party’s name [“Workers’”].* The year 1898 happened to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, and the delegates, during the three-day gathering, approved their own manifesto, a withering denunciation of “the bourgeoisie,” which they decided needed to be redrafted in order to be circulated, a task given to Pyotr Struve (b. 1870), the son of the Perm governor and an imperial law school graduate.61 (“The autocracy created in the soul, thoughts, and habits of educated Russians a psychology and tradition of state apostasy,” Struve later explained.)62 The tsarist political police knew nothing of the Minsk congress, but the attendees were already on watch lists and soon most were arrested.63 Vladimir Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, learned of the 1898 Minsk congress while off in Eastern Siberia serving a three-year term of internal exile, following fifteen months in prison, for disseminating revolutionary leaflets and plotting to assassinate the tsar. Minsk would turn out to be the only prerevolutionary RSDRP congress held on Russian empire territory.64 But soon, in European exile, a group of socialist exiles that included Plekhanov, his two satellites Pinchas Borutsch (aka Pavel Axelrod) and Vera Zasulich as well as the upstarts Julius “Yuly” Tsederbaum (aka Martov) and Lenin, published a Russian-language newspaper, initially out of Stuttgart in December 1900. Aiming to unite Russia’s revolutionaries around a Marxist program, it was called Iskra (Spark), as in “from a spark a fire will ignite.”65
AGITATOR, TEACHER
The future Stalin (like Lenin) would date his “party membership” from 1898. Back at the seminary, in fall and winter 1898–99, his infractions accumulated: arriving late at morning prayers; violating discipline at liturgy (evidently leaving early, complaining of leg pain while standing so long); arriving three days late from a leave in Gori; failing to greet a teacher (the former Inspector Murakhovsky); laughing in church; denouncing a search; leaving Vespers. Jughashvili received reprimands and had to do time in the seminary’s solitary-confinement cell. On January 18, 1899, he was forbidden to leave the premises for the city proper for one month, evidently in connection with a discovery of a large cache of forbidden books. (Another student caught was expelled.)66 More consequentially, following the Easter break, Jughashvili failed to sit his year-end exams. A May 29, 1899, entry in a Georgian exarchate official organ noted of Jughashvili: “dismissed [uvolniaetsia] from seminary for failure to appear at the examination for unknown reason.”67 This dismissal, with its enigmatic phrase “unknown reason,” has been the subject of varying interpretations, including Stalin’s own (subsequent) boast that he was “kicked out of an Orthodox theological seminary for Marxist propaganda.”68 But on more than one occasion, before he became ruler, he would state that he had suddenly been assessed a fee and could not pay it, and that going into his final year he faced the loss of his partial state financial support. Each time, however, he neglected to specify why he lost his state scholarship.69 There also seems to be no extant indication that he appealed for financial help to Egnatashvili or another benefactor. And no such failure to pay was recorded in the formal expulsion resolution. Still, his straitened circumstances were well known (many times Jughashvili had implored the rector for financial assistance), and it could be that the disciplinarians, led by Inspector Abashidze, contrived to rid themselves of Jughashvili by exploiting his poverty.70
Four years after Jughashvili’s 1899 expulsion, Abashidze would be promoted—ordained a bishop, a clear stamp of approval for his work.71 In fact, the seminary’s Russification policies had failed. Already in 1897–98, the Caucasus authorities seem to have concluded that the Tiflis seminary was harming Russia’s interests and should be closed (according to the memoirs of one teacher). Rather than closing it right away, however, the ecclesiastics decided to institute a purge of the ethnic Georgian students.72 The seminary forwarded lists of transgressing students to the gendarmerie.73 In September 1899, forty to forty-five seminarians were forced out “at their own request.” Soon, Georgian students would disappear from the seminary entirely. (The seminary would be altogether shuttered in 1907.)74 Jughashvili could have been expelled as part of the large group in fall 1899. But Abashidze’s vendetta may explain why Jughashvili’s expulsion was done individually instead. Even so, we are left with the curiosity that no reason was given for Jughashvili’s failure to sit his exams, and that he apparently did not petition to resit them. One possible clue: the year Jughashvili left the seminary he may have fathered a baby girl—Praskovya “Pasha” Georgievna Mikhailovskaya, who, in her adulthood, resembled him strongly.75 Jughashvili’s student circle was renting a hovel in Tiflis at the foot of holy Mount Mtatsminda for conspiratorial meetings, but the young men could also have used it for trysts.76 Later, Stalin would place a letter he received about the paternity in his archive. If such circumstantial evidence can be accepted, that might explain why Jughashvili faced the loss of his state scholarship and did not appeal to resit his exams or to have his state funding reinstated.77
But biographers have noted further curiosities. Upon dismissal, Jughashvili owed the state more than 600 rubles—a fantastic sum—for failing to enter the priesthood or otherwise serve the Orthodox Church (or at least become a schoolteacher). The rectorate wrote him a letter suggesting he become a teacher at a lower-level church school, but he did not take up the offer; yet the seminary does not appear to have employed the secular authorities to force him to make good his financial obligation.78 And then this: in October 1899, without having paid the money he owed, Jughashvili requested and received an official seminary document testifying to his completion of four years of study (since his fifth remained incomplete). The expellee was assigned an overall “excellent” (5) for conduct.79 These curiosities, in which, ordinarily, payment of a bribe would be suspected, may or may not be meaningful. When all is said and done, the future Stalin may have just outgrown the seminary, being two years older than his cohort and already deeply involved in Lado’s revolutionary activities. Jughashvili was not going to join the priesthood, and a seminary recommendation to continue his studies at university seemed unlikely. The expulsion, Jughashvili supposedly confided to one schoolmate, was a “blow,” but if so, he did not fight to stay.80
Jughashvili remained a book person, and more and more imagined himself in the role of teacher. He spent the summer of 1899 not in Gori but, again, in the village of Tsromi, with his buddy Mikho Davitashvili, a priest’s son. They were visited by Lado Ketskhoveli. The police searched the Davitashvili’s household but, it seems, the family had been forewarned, and the search turned up nothing. Still, Mikho was among the large group who did not continue at the seminary in September 1899 “at his own request.”81 Jughashvili would add many of the newly expelled boys from the seminary to the self-study circle he led.82 He also continued to meet with and give lectures to workers. Then, in December 1899, not long after he had obtained his official seminary four-year study document—which he may have sought for employment purposes—Jughashvili landed a paying job at the Tiflis Meteorological Observatory, a state agency. It was a stroke of luck, but also linked to his association with the Ketskhovelis: Vano Ketskhoveli, Lado’s younger brother, worked at the observatory and Jughashvili had already moved in with Va
no in October 1899; a bit later, conveniently, one of the six employees left.83 Jughashvili got paid relatively good money: 20–25 rubles per month (at a time when the average wage in the Caucasus was 14–24 rubles for skilled labor, and 10–13 for unskilled).84 Besides shoveling snow in winter and sweeping dust in summer, he recorded temperatures and barometric pressures hourly. The future Stalin also spent a great deal of time reading and he became a dedicated agitator. When he had the night shift, during the day he could read up on Marxism or lecture groups of workers, which became his absolute passion.
Further inspiration came from questioning the socialist establishment. In solidarity with Lado Ketskhoveli, who sometimes hid overnight at the observatory, Jughashvili looked askance at Jordania’s Kvali. As a legal publication, Kvali had to pass censorship and show restraint, offering a “diluted Marxism” that was anathema to younger radicals. Kvali’s feuilletons, Ketskhoveli and Jughashvili argued, “did nothing” for actual workers. Lado dreamed about starting his own illegal periodical and recruiting more young propagandists like Jughashvili.85 Jordania and his supporters opposed an illicit periodical, fearing it would cast a shadow over their legal one. When Jughashvili wrote a critique of Kvali’s seeming docility and inaction, Jordania and the editors refused to publish it. Word got back to Jibladze and Jordania that Jughashvili was agitating against Kvali behind their backs.86 But whatever the bad personal blood, a genuine difference in tactics was at stake: the future Stalin, in sync with Lado, insisted that the Marxist movement shift from educational work to direct action. Lado showed the way by organizing a strike of the city’s horse-drawn tram drivers for January 1, 1900. The drivers, for their thirteen-hour workday, earned 90 kopecks, part of which was taken back in dubious workplace “fines.” Their walkout briefly brought the capital to a halt, and forced a wage increase. That was power. There were risks, however, as Jordania and Jibladze had noted. One of the tram workers informed on Lado and in mid-January 1900 he barely escaped the Tiflis gendarmes, fleeing to Baku.87 That same month, Jughashvili was arrested—for the first time. He had just turned twenty-one, legal age, a few weeks before.
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