Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  14. Parsons, “Emergence and Development,” 268–9. Chavchavadze was murdered in 1907, a crime that remains unsolved.

  15. Jones, Socialism, 52; “Gruzinskii ekzarkhat,” IV: 197–209; Kirion, Kratkii ocherk; Agursky, “Stalin’s Ecclesiastical Background,” 4.

  16. Manuil (Lemeshchevskii), Die Russischen Orthodoxen Bischofe, II: 197–207 (at 203); Makharadze, Ocherki revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia, 57–8; Lang, Modern History, 109. Pelipe (Filipp) Makharadze, one of the leaders of a weeklong strike in 1890, was permitted to graduate. Jibladze was expelled. The student executioner was Ioseb Lagiashvili; the Rector was Pavel Chudetsky.

  17. Quoted in Souvarine, Stalin, 14–5.

  18. Zhordania, Moia zhizn’, 11–15; Uratadze, Vospominaniia, 58–9.

  19. “Iz zaiavleniiia,” 174–5; Makharadze, Ocherki revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia, 57–8.

  20. Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 112 (citing GF IML, f. 8, op. 2, d. 52, l. 198–9: I. Tsintsadze).

  21. Rayfield, “Stalin as Poet”; Sochineniia, XVII: 1–6.

  22. Rayfield, Literature of Georgia, 3rd ed., 182–3.

  23. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 655 (Kapanadze).

  24. Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 125 (citing GF IML, f. 8, op. 2, ch. 1, d. 12, l. 176: Devdariani); RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 665, l. 128 (Parkadze); Iremashvili, Stalin und die Tragodie, 17. Iremashvili belonged to the Devdariani circle, too. Devdariani, who became a philosopher, was shot in 1937 by Beria’s men. His manuscript, “A History of Georgian Thought,” evidently vanished. Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen, 49.

  25. Iremashvili, Stalin und die Tragodie, 16–7. See also Darlington, Education in Russia, 286–8.

  26. De Lon, “Stalin and Social Democracy,” 170. Sofrom Mgaloblishvili, who had graduated from the Tiflis seminary and returned to Gori in the 1870s, brought back a cache of Georgian-language books, which became a de facto library. He and others established a Populist circle, which, inevitably, the police infiltrated; in 1878 they carried out arrests. (Just as important, the activists found the peasants unresponsive to the townfolk.) Mgaloblishvili, Vospominanii, 120. In Gori, a “military-conspiratorial organisation,” with loose ties to the People’s Will in St. Petersburg, was also closed down by the police. A less outre “circle of seminarists,” inspired by Land and Liberty, endured into the 1890s. Its members included the sons of the town’s nobles and one boy of peasant descent, Arsen Kalanadze, who ran the bookstall that welcomed schoolboys from the church school and seminarians. G. Glurdzhidze, “Pamiatnye gody,” 18.

  27. Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, “Detstvo,” 71.

  28. In fall 1898, Inspector Abashidze recorded the following: “Jughashvili, Iosif (V. I), during a search of the belongings of certain fifth-grade pupils, several times spoke up to the inspectors, giving voice in his remarks to the discontent over the searches . . .” Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, “Detstvo,” 65, 84. See also “Neopublikovannye materialy iz biografii tov. Stalina,” Antireligioznik (Razmadze).

  29. “Iz besedy,” reprinted (in further edited form) in Sochineniia, XIII: 104–23 (at 113). On the searches, see also Glurdzhidze, “Pamiatnye gody,” 20; Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, “Detstvo,” 66 (Vano Ketskhoveli).

  30. Trotsky, Stalin [1946], 10.

  31. Jones, Socialism, 51, 309, n11. See also Chelidze, Iz revoliutsionnogo.

  32. Manchester, Holy Fathers. The sons of priests (popovichi) comprised 1 percent of the empire’s population.

  33. RGASPI, f. 71, op. 10, d. 273, l. 185; Rieber, “Stalin as Georgian,” 34. Davitashvili emigrated to Leipzig.

  34. In Gori, Tarasei Mgaloblishvili is said to have organized posses to defend the peasants. Mgaloblishvili, Vospominaniia, 35–6, 37–9.

  35. Jones, Socialism, 22–6.

  36. RGASPI, f. 71, op. 10, d. 273, l. 201–2 (Elisabedashvili). The young Stalin helped Elisabedashvili prepare for exams in the summer of 1898.

  37. Stalin-era reminisicences reverse the roles: “Neopublikovannye materialy iz biografii tov. Stalina,” Antireligioznik (Razmadze).

  38. Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 139 (citing GF IML, f. 8, op. 2, ch. 1, d. 12, l. 181: S. Devdariani); RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 665; Iremashvili, Stalin und die Tragodie, 21.

  39. Iremashvili, Stalin und die Tragodie, 5–6.

  40. Lado may have been introduced to the Third Group by Aleksandr Tsulukidze, who had joined in 1895. Beriia and Broido, Lado Ketskhoveli, 9–10; Khachapuridze, “Gruziia vo vtoroi,” 66; V. Ketskhoveli, “Druz’ia i soratniki tovarishcha Stalina,” 75–86.

  41. RGASPI, f. 71, op. 10, d. 272, l. 67.

  42. Katalog Tiflisskoi Deshevoi biblioteki, 15, 17. See also RGASPI, f. 71, op. 10, d. 273, l. 179 (Ignatii Nonoshvili).

  43. RGASPI, f. 71, op. 10, d. 273, l. 85 (Parkadze); Uratadze, Vospominaniia, 15. On how Lado led Stalin into a life in the underground, see Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 89–90.

  44. Riasanovsky, Teaching of Charles Fourier.

  45. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 64–5, 67.

  46. Malia, Alexander Herzen. See also Randolph, House in the Garden.

  47. Peasants in Russia existed in three institutional forms: serfs living on privately owned gentry land (around 42 percent), state peasants residing on rented state-owned land (around 53 percent), and court peasants belonging directly to the imperial household with a status somewhere between serfs and state peasants (around 5 percent). Kabuzan, Izmenenie v razmeshchenii. See also Crisp, “State Peasants”; Deal, Serf and Peasant Agriculture.

  48. The land rights awarded to the peasants came in the form of communal allotments, with the commune collectively answering for required redemption payments to the nobility, while rights to forests (fuel) and meadows (livestock grazing) remained under gentry control, a source of enduring anger among peasants. But how much the emancipation actually altered even arable landholding patterns over the long term remains a matter of dispute. Gershchenkron, “Agrarian Policies”; Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control; Gatrell, Government, Industry, and Rearmament; Mironov, Gosudari i gosudarevy liudi. State peasant landholding reforms in 1865 allotted them the same land at lower price.

  49. Wortman, Crisis of Russian Populism.

  50. Baron, Plekhanov; Baron, “Between Marx and Lenin”; von Laue, “The Fate of Capitalism in Russia.”

  51. Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence [1944], 354–5. See also Shanin, Late Marx.

  52. “Tsensura.”

  53. Liadov, “Zarozhdenie legal’nogo,” 107ff.

  54. Zhordania, Moia zhizn’, 8–9, 13, 25, 27.

  55. Gorgiladze, “Rasprostranenie marksizma v Gruzii,” V: 472.

  56. Makharadze, Ocherki revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia, 53, 72–3; Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 141 (citing GARF, f. 124, op. 7, d. 144, l. 1–6).

  57. Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 130–1; Sochineniia, VIII: 173–4.

  58. RGASPI, f. 71, op. 10, d. 273, l. 195–7. Stalin’s future father-in-law properly dates his first encounter with workers to 1898. Sergei Alliluev, “Vstrechi s tovarishchem Stalinym,” 154.

  59. Sochineniia, VIII: 174; Rieber, “Stalin as Georgian,” 35–9; Jones, Socialism, 71–5.

  60. Jordania, “Staline, L’Écho de la lutte”; Vakar, “Stalin.”

  61. Struve would go on to co-found the Constitutional Democrat Party, or Kadets, in October 1905, when political parties became legal.

  62. Struve, “Istoricheskii smysl russkoi revoliutsii i natsional’nye zadachi.”

  63. Of the nine attendees, one would die in 1911; five would leave Russia shortly after the 1917 revolution; one left in 1922; two (including Eidelman) would be executed in Stalin’s purges. Medish, “First Party Congress.”

  64. A second “founding” congress, four years later, in Bialystok—Russian Poland—would fizzle.


  65. Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, I: 6–7; Vsesoiuznaia Kommunisticheskaia Partiia (b) v rezoliutsiiakh (6th ed.), I: 7–10. After Lenin’s term of Siberian exile had ended in January 1900, he and his young wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya—they had married in July 1898—relocated to Pskov, but within months they departed for foreign exile in Germany. Service, Lenin, I: 80–1; Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, III: 3.

  66. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 53, l. 2, 157 and others unnumbered; d. 60, l. 1–4; Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, “Detstvo,” 84–5 (Talakvadze); Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 140–1 (the expelled student was Vasily Kelbakiani).

  67. GIAG, f. 440, op. 2, d. 64, l. 7ob; Dukhovnyi vestnik gruzinskogo ekzarkhata (June 15–July 1, 1899), no. 12–13: 8; Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, “Detstvo,” 86.

  68. Stalin entered this claim on a 1932 party questionnaire, and it entered the party canon. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 4349, l. 1; Aleksandrov, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, 10; Yaroslavsky, O Tovarishche Staline, 14; Istoricheskie mesta Tblisi, 29; Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 91. Stalin’s mother later sought to take the blame, asserting that she removed him because he had contracted tuberculosis. In fact, Keke was angry at his expulsion. Smith, Young Stalin, 54 (citing an interview with Keke by H. R. Knickerbocker, New York Evening Post, December 1, 1930); GF IML, f. 8, op. 2, ch. 1, d. 32, l. 258–9 (Mariia Kublidze).

  69. These statements were made in 1902 (in Batum prison), in 1910 (Baku), and in 1913. Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 142–3 (citing GIAG, f. 153, op. 1, d. 3431, l. 275; RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 214, l. 9ob); Montefiore, Young Stalin, 73 (citing RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 635 and f. 71, op. 10, d. 275).

  70. Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, “Detstvo,” 84; Montefiore, Young Stalin, 70–3. Abashidze seems to have tried but failed to achieve Jughashvili’s expulsion already in fall 1898. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 665, l. 211–2 (Vaso Kakhanishvili); GF IML, f. 8, op. 2, ch. 1, d. 10., l. 141 (Gogokhiia); Zaria vostoka, August 12, 1936 (Gogokhiia); GF IML, f. 8, op. 2, ch. 1, d. 47, l. 126–7 (Talakvadze).

  71. Abashidze, because of his pro-Russian extremism, had to be recalled from Georgia in 1905. He served in Ukraine (Podolia), Turkestan, and Crimea, where in 1914 he joined the navy as a chaplain for the Black Sea Fleet. In 1918 he refused to recognize the restoration of the Georgian Church’s autocephaly. In the civil war he supported the Whites and Wrangel’s army, emigrating in 1919. In the late 1920s he surfaced in Kiev, where he had graduated from the Theological Academy many years before (1896), and became a monk-hermit, changing his monastic name to Antoni. He somehow survived the purges in Ukraine that destroyed the clergy and then survived the Nazi occupation, dying a natural death in December 1943 soon after the Red Army retook Kiev. He was buried in the Kievan Caves Monastery with a marble gravestone. Manuil (Lemeshchevskii), Die Russischen Orthodoxen Bischofe, III: 27–8; Agursky, “Stalin’s Ecclesiastical Background,” 10.

  72. Agursky, “Stalin’s Ecclesiastical Background,” 6 (citing Anonymous, Iz vospominanii russkogo uchitelia pravoslavnoi gruzinskoi dukhovnoi seminarii [Moscow, 1907]); and Durnovo, Sud’ba gruzinskoi tserkvi.

  73. Kun, Unknown Portrait, 30.

  74. RGASPI, f. 71, op. 10, d. 73, l. 153–4; Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, “Detstvo,” 62–6. By 1900, there were said to be just 50 Georgians out of 300 students, and by 1905 just four Georgians were graduated. The Kutaisi Seminary was shuttered in 1905.

  75. In 1938, Pasha’s husband’s aunt wrote to Stalin about her niece; the letter reached Poskryobyshev on April 16, 1938, via the NKVD (V. Ivanov). The letter pointedly mentioned that Stalin’s mother knew of the child’s existence, and that the dark-eyed Pasha had become bereft after her husband, her own child, and her mother had died. Pasha evidently had tried to visit Stalin in March 1938, handing to his secretariat photographs and copies of her letters to him over the years. She had been living in Saratov province, but vanished in Moscow—no doubt arrested. Ilizarov, Tainaia zhizn’, 284–7 (citing RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 775, l. 9–13). Stalin had the husband’s aunt’s letter preserved in his archive. “In his youth Comrade Soso felt some sympathy towards a certain person, but it did not last for too long,” recalled an elliptical Grigory Elisabedashvili. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 655.

  76. Gogokhiia, “Na vsiu zhizn’ zapomnilos’ eti dni,” 13; Montefiore, Young Stalin, 72–3.

  77. One memoir claims Jughashvili was already absent from the seminary when it reopened after Easter recess, before the exam period even commenced, having gone home to Gori. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 665, l. 381 (Talakvadze); GF, f. 8, op. 2, ch. 1, d. 47, l. 126–7.

  78. Kun, Unknown Portrait, 32–3; Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 146–7 (citing GIAG, f. 440, op. 2, d. 82, l. 59; RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 65, l. 3–3ob).

  79. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 65, l. 1–4; Vano Ketskhoveli, “Na zare sozdanii partii rabochego klassa,” Zaria vostoka, July 17, 1939: 3.

  80. Dawrichewy, Ah: ce qu’on, 67. Iremashvili claims he tried to talk Jughashvili out of leaving the seminary, because that would mean forgoing a chance at university, but that Jughashvili did not think the authorities would allow him to attend university and that in any case he was committed to revolution as a profession. Iremashvili, Stalin und die Tragodie, 23–4.

  81. GF IML, f. 8, op. 2, ch. 1, d. 48, l. 164 (Elisabedashvili); d. 12, l. 28–9 (P. Davitashvili).

  82. Montefiore, Young Stalin, 79; van Ree, “The Stalinist Self,” 266, citing G. Elisabedashvili, I. V. Stalin State House Gori—Museum Fund, f. 3, op. 1, d. 1955/146, l. 1–11, 20–31 (in Georgian).

  83. GF IML, f. 8, op. 5, d. 429, l. 170 (Vano Ketskhoveli); Vano Ketskhoveli, “Na zare sozdaniia partii rabochego klassa”; “K istorii fabrik i zavodov Tblisi”; Berdzenishvili, “Iz vospominanii”; RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 651, l. 50–3.

  84. Jones, Socialism, 91.

  85. V. Ketskhoveli, “Druz’ia i soratniki tovarishcha Stalina,” 75–86; Jones, Socialism, 71–2.

  86. Iremashvili, Stalin und die Tragodie, 22; Vakar, “Stalin”; Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 87–8.

  87. RGASPI, f. 71, op. 10, d. 273, l. 240; Vano Ketskhoveli, “Iz vospominanii o Lado Ketskhoveli,” Zaria vostoka, August 17, 1939: 3; Lado Ketsokhveli, 76, 109–10.

  88. “Neopublikovannye materialy iz biografii tov. Stalina,” Antireligioznik (Kitiashvili).

  89. Montefiore, Young Stalin, 70 (relying on Anna Geladze, Keke’s cousin).

  90. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 72, l. 5; Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 160; Rieber, “Stalin as Georgian,” 39; Galoian, Rabochee dvizhenie i natsional’nyi vopros v Zakavkaz’e, 10–2.

  91. Jones, Socialism, 70, 99.

  92. Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 161 (citing GF IML, f. 8, op. 2, ch. 1, d. 15, l. 245: N. L. Dombrovskii).

  93. Lado Ketskhoveli, 24; Jones, Socialism, 100–1; Tutaev, Alliluyev Memoirs, 49–51.

  94. Another key early figure was Viktor Kurnatovsky, then thirty-two years old, whom Stalin met in Tiflis in 1900. Kurnatovsky had met with Lenin. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 30.

  95. In 1938, Beria attributed the article to Stalin and Ketskhoveli together. Stalin later assumed sole authorship of the essay, which was translated into Russian as “Rossiiskaia sotsial-demokraticheskaia partiia i ee blizhaishie zadachi.” Sochineniia, I: 11–31 (at 27); Beriia and Broido, Lado Ketskhoveli, 17–33. Stalin also falsely claimed authorship of Brdzola’s first (unsigned) editorial. Sochineniia, I: 4–9; Deutscher, Stalin, 56–7; Jones, Socialism, 315.

  96. “Podpol’naia tipografiia ‘Iskra’ v Baku (Materialy Vano Sturua),” 137–8; Yenukidze, Nashi podpol’nye tipografii na Kavkaze, 24; V. Ketskhoveli, “Druz’ia i soratnikitovarishcha Stalina,” 75–86; Lelashvili, “Lado Ketskhoveli,” 87–90; Jones, Socialism, 72–3. There have been intimations that the tsarist political police paid bonuses for the liquidation of revolutionary printing presses—leading to exaggerations of their number—but on
e of the political police chiefs claimed he liquidated ten of them and got nothing for it. Martynov, Moia sluzhba, 100, 313–4.

  97. Makeev, “Bakinskaia podpol’naia tipografiia ‘Nina’ (1901–1905),” XVII: 90–109; Аrenshtein, “Tipografiia Leninskoi ‘Iskry’ v Baku”; Nаlbandian, “‘Iskra’ i tipografiia ‘Nina’ v Baku,” XXIV: 3–30; Sarkisov, Bakinskaia tipografiia leninskoi “Iskry.”

  98. Faerman, “Transportirovka ‘Iskry’ iz-za granitsy i rasprostranenie ee v Rossii v 1901–1903 gg.,” 54–92; Koroleva, “Deiatel’nost’ V. I. Lenina po organizatsii dostavki ‘Iskry’ v Rossiiu (dekabr’ 1900 g.–noiabr’ 1903 g.)”; Podpol’nye tipografii Leninskoi “Iskry” v Rossii; V. Kozhevnikova “Gody staroi Iskry.”

  99. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered; Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, I: 11–22; Ulam, The Bolsheviks, 160–216.

  100. Arkomed, Rabochee dvizhenie, 81–4 (at 84); Talakavadze, K istorii, I: 62; Rieber, “Stalin as Georgian,” 39; Talakavadze, K istorii, 62–3; Jones, Socialism, 106; van Ree, “Stalinist Self,” 267 (citing GARF, f. 102, op. 199, d. 175, l. 93). Arkomed (real name was S. A. Kardjian) evidently gave the speech in November 1901 that provoked Stalin’s objections to admitting workers. The first edition of Arkomed’s book appeared in 1910 in the emigration, but the 1923 version (which differs only in the addition of notes) was published in the Soviet Union and cleverly managed to criticize Stalin without naming him.

  101. RGASPI, f. 70, op. 10, d.273, 292. A claim by Stalin’s enemies that a party tribunal had expelled him from the Tiflis Committee for intrigues against Silva Jibladze finds no support in extant police surveillance records, which noted that Jughashvili failed to attend a Tiflis Committee meeting on November 25, 1901, but mentioned nothing of any expulsion. In fact, Jughashvili appears to have been co-opted into the Tiflis Committee in November 1901 (one of nine). Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 169–73. On the supposed expulsion, see Vakar, “Stalin”; Jordania, “Staline, L’Écho de la lutte,” 3–4; and Uratadze, Vospominaniia, 67. Silva Jibladze’s grievances against Stalin were especially bitter. In 1921, after Bolshevik forces would reconquer the Caucasus, Jibladze would choose not to emigrate in order to organize a Menshevik underground. He died suddenly in February 1922, evidently of ill health; his comrades removed the body from a “conspiratorial apartment,” but the Bolshevik secret police in Tiflis confiscated it. It is said that Beria was involved (Beria was then in the Georgian Cheka, becoming its head in November 1922). Jibladze’s gravesite, if any, remains a mystery. Uratadze, Vospominaniia, 278.