20. Montefiore, Young Stalin, 10.
21. Only Lavrenti Beria’s later move to Moscow was utterly dependent on Stalin, but Beria, unlike Stalin, had forged a huge Caucasus machine, which, also unlike Stalin, he brought with him to Moscow and spread throughout the Soviet state.
22. Kun, Unknown Portrait, 74–5; Montefiore, Young Stalin, 3–16. Of the highway robbery question, Emil Ludwig had written in his 1931 interview with Stalin, “it was the only one he would not answer—except to the extent that he answered it by passing over it.” “Iz besedy,” Bol’shevik, 42–3.
23. Some of the most accomplished practitioners of the craft of biography regard filling in the gaps as a necessity. See, for example, the meditations by Hermione Lee in Virginia Woolf’s Nose.
24. The archive of Georgian Social Democracy has gone missing. Van Ree, “The Stalinist Self,” 263, n18 (citing Stephen Jones, personal communication, August 2006).
25. Arsenidze, “Iz vospominaniia o Staline,” 219. See also Boris Ivanov, a fellow exile in Siberia, in Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 160–1.
26. Stalin filled in a questionnaire at the fourth conference of the Ukrainian Communist party in March 1920, in which he claimed eight arrests, seven cases of exile, and six escapes between 1902 and 1913. Later that same year, for a Swedish Social Democrat periodical, Stalin claimed seven arrests, six cases of exile, and five escapes. This became the source of confusion in his official biographies. Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 7. This edition (2004) differs slightly from the earlier one (Olma, 2002).
27. The young Stalin’s school years coincided with the rule of Alexander III (r. 1881–94), when all the empire’s elementary schools were placed under the Holy Synod in order to magnify the Orthodox Church’s influence in education (which was already high). Istoricheskii ocherk razvitia tserkovnykh.
28. Rayfield, “Stalin as Poet.”
29. De Lon, “Stalin and Social Democracy,” 169.
30. Service, Stalin, 27; King, Ghost of Freedom, 183–4.
31. Pokhlebkin, Velikii psevdonim, 76; Iremashvili, Stalin und die Tragodie, 18.
32. Ostrovskii, Kto stoial; RGASPI, f. 71, op. 10, d. 273 (Vladimir Kaminskii, “An Outline of the Years of Childhood and Youth of Stalin”); Rieber, “Stalin as Georgian: the Formative Years,” 18–44; Jones, Socialism. A list of Stalin’s pseudonyms and aliases can be found in Smith, Young Stalin, 453–4. A list of all “the girls”—ten, not including two wives, by 1918—can be found in Montefiore, Young Stalin, xxviii.
CHAPTER 1: AN IMPERIAL SON
1. Ludwig asked the dictator whether he had become a professional revolutionary because of mistreatment as a child. Stalin could scarcely have allowed his commitment to revolution to have derived from childhood resentments, but his denial rings true all the same. “Iz besedy,” Bol’shevik, 1932, no. 8, reprinted in Sochineniia, XIII: 104–23 (at 113).
2. Mitchell, Maritime History.
3. Lieven, Empire, 204.
4. Blum, Lord and Peasant; Raef, Understanding Imperial Russia; Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control.
5. de Madariaga, Russia in the Age; Klier, Russia Gathers Her Jews.
6. Bushkovitch, “Princes Cherkasskii.”
7. Baddeley, Russian Conquest; Allen, “Caucasian Borderland,” 230; Gammer, Muslim Resistance.
8. Some resettled in the North Caucasus lowlands rather than cross the border. Degoev, Kavkaz i velikie; Barrett, Edge of Empire; Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizer; Jersild, Orientalism and Empire.
9. King, Ghost of Freedom, 140. The notorious imperial Russian Caucasus pro-consul, General Aleksei Ermolov (1771–1861), who complained that “the mountains are full of ungoverned people,” went about in local costume and enveloped himself in Caucasus artifacts.
10. Avalon, Prisoedinenie Gruzii k Rossii; Gvosdev, Imperial Policies. See also Allen, History of the Georgian People; and Atkin, “Russian Expansion,” 139–87.
11. “Georgians,” one scholar has written, “had some reasons to be grateful for Russian rule.” Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen, 3. By 1915, the local population had reached 11.5 million people, including both the South Caucasus (Transcaucasus) and North Caucasus.
12. Lang, Last Years; Jones, “Russian Imperial Administration.” See also Suny, Georgian Nation, 70–3.
13. Zubov, Kartina Kavkazskogo, I: 151. One early foreign observer called Tiflis “a second St. Petersburg.” Van Halen, Memoirs, II: 167.
14. For the ways in which Stalin was a man of the imperial borderlands, see Rieber, “Stalin: Man of the Borderlands.”
15. Kavkaz: spravochnaia kniga storozhila, 60; Azhavakov, “Gorod Gori”; Sidorov, Po Rossii, 460–77; Gorkii, “Prazdnik shiitov”; Bukhnikashvili, Gori.
16. Mgaloblishvili, Vospominaniia, 11, 14.
17. Gogokhiia, “Na vsiu zhizn’ zapomnilis’ eti dni,” 7.
18. An earthquake in February 1920 damaged the town. In the 400-plus-page Caucasus guidebook of 1927, Gori merited slightly more than a page, which singled out the town’s ruins and renowned peaches, but made no mention of Stalin’s birthplace. Batenina, Kavkaz, 395–6.
19. Kun, Unknown Portrait, 19, n30.
20. Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, “Detstvo,” 24–5.
21. Montefiore, Young Stalin, 19 (citing GF IML, f. 8, op. 2, ch. 1, l. 143–6: M. K. Abramidze-Tsikhitatrishvili). The official marriage date (as opposed to the betrothal) is sometimes given as May 1872, which Montefiore uses (citing GF IML, f. 8, op. 5, d. 213 [no page] and RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 1, l. 1). But if they were married in 1872, it is puzzling why he writes “just over nine months after the wedding, on 14 February 1875” (22). The official birth date of Stalin’s mother in Soviet sources has also varied, sometimes set at 1860. She appears to have been at least two years older, and her obituaries claimed she was four years older (born 1856), evidently to make her appear older at the time of her wedding: sixteen (if 1872) or eighteen (if 1874). Zaria vostoka, June 8, 1937.
22. Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, “Detstvo,” 24–5 (Elisabedashvili); Montefiore, Young Stalin, 21 (citing: GF IML, f. 8, op. 2, d. 15, l. 2–15: Keke’s unpublished “memoirs”). Keke’s reminiscences were recorded by L. Kasradze, in August 1935, when she was nearing eighty. According to Montefiore, the “newly discovered memoirs” remained “untouched” for seventy years. Ostrovskii uses “a conversation” with Keke, which he dates May 1935, in his 2002 edition of Kto stoial.
23. On weddings in Gori: Suliashvili, Uchenicheskie gody, 24–8.
24. Montefiore, Young Stalin, 19–20 (citing GF IML, f. 8, op. 2, d. 15, l. 2–15: Keke’s unpublished “memoirs”).
25. Stalin later advanced his birth year from 1878 to 1879. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 61, l. 1. As late as the end of 1920, he was still giving December 6, 1878, as his birth date, but in 1922, one of his assistants issued a “correction” to December 21, 1879, which became the official date. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1990, no. 11: 134 (Tovstukha). It remains unclear why Stalin chose a different day as well as a different year. For further discussion of Stalin’s birth year, see Kun, Unknown Portrait, 8–10, 60; and Rieber, “Stalin, Man of the Borderlands,” 1,659.
26. By some hearsay accounts, a girl was born in 1875 and lived a week, but no evidence supports this.
27. Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, “Detstvo,” 27–8.
28. Zhukov, Vospominaniia, III: 215.
29. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 665 (Abramidze-Tsikhitatrishvili).
30. Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 93 (citing Dato Gasitashvili, GF IML, f. 8, op. 2, ch. 2, d. 8. l. 196, 200); Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, “Detstvo,” 30 (Elisabedashvili). See also GF IML, f. 8, op. 2, ch. 1, d. 10, l. 23–47 (Goglichidze); and Iremashvili, Stalin und die Tragodie, 8–10.
31. Khutsishvili wrote to Stalin in 1939: RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 722, l. 51.
32. L
obanov, Stalin v vospominaniakh, 13–4 (D. Papiashvili); GF IML, f. 8, op. 2, ch. 1, d. 53 (Aleksandr Tsikhitatrishvili); Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, “Detstvo,” 26; Ostrovskii, “Predki Stalin.” “Besarion was a very odd person,” another witness recalled. “He was of middling height, swarthy, with big black mustaches and long eyebrows, his expression was severe and he walked about looking gloomy.” RGASPI, f. 8, op. 2, d. 1, l. 48 (N. Tlashadze). In the Stalin museum in Gori hangs a copy of the only known photograph of Beso, depicting him in advanced age, but it may or may not be him.
33. Montefiore, Young Stalin, 25–8. Although Montefiore closely tracks with Keke’s account of Beso’s dissolute behavior, citing her “memoirs” (the interviews), he nonetheless also supplies the evidence of Keke’s “earthy mischief,” which contradicts her one-sided account.
34. Dawrichewy, Ah: ce qu’on, 26–7. (Davrishevi was the son of the Gori policeman.)
35. According to the dubious Sergo Beria (Lavrenti’s son), Keke supposedly once told Sergo’s grandmother, “When I was young, I cleaned house for people and when I met a good-looking boy, I didn’t waste the opportunity.” Beria, Beria My Father, 21.
36. Dawrichewy, Ah: ce qu’on, 30–5.
37. Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 88–9; Service, Stalin, 17. Stalin never became a hard drinker and, though he would prove promiscuous as a young adult, he developed a pronounced prudishness.
38. Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 89 (citing “Detskie i shkol’nye gody Iosifa Vissarionovicha Dzhugashvili [Stalina]”; GF IML, f. 8, op. 6, d. 306, l. 13; Gori. d. 287/1, l. 2).
39. Suliashvili, Uchenicheskie gody, 9–16.
40. “Yakov was mischievous and restless as a boy,” recalled Sverdlov’s wife. “He organized games for all the children on the street.” Sverdlova, Iakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov [1976], 60.
41. Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 99 (citing GF IML, f. 8, op. 2, ch. 1, d. 10, l. 57); Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, “Detstvo,” 37 (Goglichidze).
42. Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, “Detstvo,” 37 (Elisabedashvili).
43. Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 93–4 (citing GF IML, f. 8, op. 2, ch. 1, d. 10, l. 57: S. Goglichidze); “Detskie i shkol’nye gody Iosifa Vissarionovicha Dzhugashvili,” GF IML, f. 8, op. 6, d. 306, l. 13).
44. Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 101 (citing GF IML, f. 8, op. 2, ch. 1, d. 48, l. 14–5: E. K. Jughashvili, May 1935). Goglichidze’s recollections have Soso returning to school within two weeks, which is obviously false—why would he have had to repeat the grade?
45. Pravda, October 27, 1935. The dates in the memoirs concerning when Beso removed Soso from school are in conflict. For example, Masho Abramidze, Stalin’s wet nurse and neighbor, recalled that Beso threatened to remove Soso from school in the second grade, which would have been 1891–2, and that both her husband and Yakov Egnatashvili tried to talk Beso out of it. Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, “Detstvo,” 43–5.
46. Novoe obozrenie, January 6, 1891; Khoshtaria-Brose, Ocherki sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoi, 46–7.
47. The Metekhi fortress dates from the fifth century, but it was wrecked many times, including by the Persian shah in the 1790s, after which the Russian empire rebuilt it as a prison in 1819. It remained a prison under the Soviets until 1934, when it became the Georgian SSR State Art Museum (and later a scientific institute). In 1959 the Metekhi fortress was torn down.
48. Makharadze and Khachapuridze, Ocherki, 143–4.
49. Choirmaster Goglichidze, who is cited often on the “kidnapping,” and who later took credit for Soso’s school career, made it seem that Beso just could not stomach Soso studying: “The thought that his son was going to school and not learning a trade did not give the father peace. And one fine day Vissarion arrived in Gori and gave Soso over to the Adelkhanov factory.” Lobanov, Stalin v vospominaniakh, 20.
50. Trotsky, Stalin, 9.
51. Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, “Detstvo,” 45 (Goglichidze).
52. Iremashvili, Stalin und die Tragodie, 5–6. Stalin’s daughter from his second marriage, Svetlana, who as a child knew Keke but not Beso, later said that Stalin was “much more like her than like his father.” Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 204.
53. Loginov, Teni Stalina, 56 (quoting Pavel Rusishvili). Rusishvili first met Stalin in the spring of 1938, at the Zareche dacha just outside Moscow, in the company of other Georgians, including Data Gasitashvili and the Agnatashvilis, as well as Beria. Stalin, upon entering the villa, said in Georgian, “May God grant health to those of this house” (Loginov, 60–1). Gasitashvili, who waited a long time while in Moscow to be received by Stalin, lived in Gori in a single room with a metal bed (his sons occupied the rest of the modest living space).
54. Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 94–5; RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 669 (Kapanadze); GF IML, f. 8, op. 2, ch. 1, d. 48, l. 14–5 (E. Jughashvili, May 1935).
55. Mgeladze, Stalin, 242 (citing Guram Ratishvili, a grandson of Yakov Egnatashvili).
56. Lang, Modern History, 114–5; Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 80–81; Montefiore, Young Stalin, 63.
57. Iremashvili, Stalin und die Tragodie, 18. It is not clear when the young Stalin first read the novel. In 1893, the year before he entered the seminary in the Georgian capital, Qazbegi died penniless in a Georgian insane asylum, but Chavchavadze wrote a prominent obituary.
58. Iremashvili, Stalin und die Tragodie, 14; Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 360 (“The mother would beat the boy, and her husband would beat her”); and Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 153–4, 204.
59. Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, “Detstvo,” 49–50; on Stalin’s participation: RGASPI, f. 71, op. 10, d. 273, l. 86–8.
60. Dawrichewy, Ah: ce qu’on, 82; Iremashvili, Stalin und die Tragodie, 5; Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, 29–32, 48–50 (B. Ivanter, A. Khakonov). “Those Egnatashvilis were such famed wrestlers, they were known through the whole of Kartli,” the future Stalin is said to have recalled. “But the first and strongest was Yakov.” Montefiore, Young Stalin, 38–9 (citing Candide Charviani, “Memoirs” [unpublished manuscript], 3). On Gori street culture, see Suliashvili, Uchenicheskie gody, 41–6.
61. Smith, Young Stalin, 28–9 (citing an August 1909 Russian police report at the Hoover Institution Archives); Montefiore, Young Stalin, 57, 70. On the Armenian bazaar in Tiflis, near the Maidan, see Nadezhdin, Kavkazskii krai, 318–9.
62. Stalin continued: “I recall I was 10 and I was not happy that my father lost everything and I did not know that it would be recorded as a plus for me 40 years later. But this is a plus that I utterly did not earn.” RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1121, l. 49–50, reprinted in Istochnik, 2001, no. 2: 54–5.
63. Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 96 (citing GF IML, f. 8, op. 2, ch. 1, d. 1, l. 228–9, 236–9: Pyotr Adamishvili).
64. Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, “Detstvo,” 36 (Elisabedashvili), 41 (Goglichidze); “Neopublikovannye materialy iz biografii tov. Stalina,” Antireligioznik (Khabelashvili). The young Stalin’s language teacher was Vladimir Lavrov.
65. Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, “Detstvo,” 41–2; Iremashvili, Stalin und die Tragodie, 7–8.
66. GF IML, f. 8, op. 2, ch. 1, d. 10, l. 23–47 (Goglichidze), d. 54, l. 202–15 (Kote Charkviani); Montefiore, Young Stalin, 43–4.
67. Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, “Detstvo,” 34 (Elisabedashvili).
68. This appears not just in internal memoirs of the Stalin era, but also in the emigre Iremashvili’s Stalin und die Tragodie, 8. See also Suliashvili, Uchenicheskie gody, 13.
69. Rank, Trauma of Birth; Horney, Neurotic Personality; Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth; Erikson, Young Man Luther; Tucker, “Mistaken Identity”; Tucker, “A Stalin Biography’s Memoir,” 63–81.
70. Tovarishch Kirov; Kostrikova and Kostrikova, Eto bylo; Sinel’nikov, Kirov.
71. Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen, 8.
72. Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 1
09. Georgia had three seminaries; the third was in Kutaisi.
73. “Neopublikovannye materialy iz biografii tov. Stalina,” Antireligioznik (Grigory Glurdzhidze).
74. Dawrichevy, Ah: ce qu’on, 47, 60. Davrishevi’s police chief father sent him to the Classical Gymnasium no. 1 in Tiflis.
CHAPTER 2: LADO’S DISCIPLE
1. Ostrosvkii, Kto stoial, (2002), 197.
2. Cameron, Personal Adventures, I: 83. See also Wagner, Travels in Persia, II: 119.
3. Badriashvili, Tiflis; Chkhetia, Tblisi. The 1897 census recorded 159,590 people. Of that number there were 47,000 Armenians, but by 1910 Armenians grew to more than 120,000 of 303,000 total people, or more than 40 percent. Pervaia vseobschaia perepis’ naseleniia Rossiiskoi imperii, xi–xiv; Kavkaz: Opisanie kraia; Suny, “Tiflis,” 249–82. The city became predominantly Georgian in 1970.
4. Tiflis had six newspapers in Armenian, five in Russian, and four in Georgian. Bagilev, Putevoditel’ po Tiflisu. On the municipal franchise in the empire, see Seton-Watson, Russian Empire, 662–3.
5. Moskvich, Putevoditel’ po Kavkazu, 246. The Narikala Citadel is said to date originally from Persian rule in the fourth century, but the name is Turkic and from the Mongol period (thirteenth century); an earthquake leveled the fortress in 1827.
6. Baedeker, Russia: A Handbook, 465–71.
7. Anchabadze and Volkova, Stary Tblisi, 98–9. In Tiflis it was said that “a Greek will cheat three Jews, but an Armenian will cheat three Greeks.”
8. Makharadze and Khachapuridze, Ocherki, 66, 114–7; Khachapuridze, “Gruziia vo vtoroi,” 46–66; Suny, Georgian Nation, 124–43.
9. Rieber, “Stalin as Georgian: The Formative Years.”
10. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 89–90.
11. Iremashvili, Stalin und die Tragodie, 16–7. See also Gogokhiia, “Na vsiu zhizn’ zapomnilis’ eti dni,” 14–5.
12. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 21, d. 29, d. 665. This is well covered in Kun, Unknown Portrait, 26.
13. Kun, Unknown Portrait, 27 (citing RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 4327: petition dated June 3, 1898).
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