Stalin

by Ian Grey

  Joseph Iremashvili, one of Joseph’s boyhood friends, described Vissarion as thick-set in build, with black eyebrows and mustache, stern and irascible in temperament. He was said to have been a drunkard. Georgians had a reputation for drinking heavily. In Georgia and Russia, “drunk as a cobbler” was a common expression.

  Iremashvili, writing years later and with the hindsight and bias of an émigré, observed that “undeserved and frightful beatings made the boy as grim and heartless as was his father.” Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, related that her father told her how in defense of his mother, “one day he threw a knife at his father. The father rushed after him screaming and neighbours hid the boy.”

  His mother, Ekaterina, was the dominant person in his childhood. When young, she was apparently an attractive, red-headed woman. Like her husband, she spoke only Georgian, but in later years, she learned to read and at least to write her name in Russian in order to be worthy of her son. He was the center of her life. Since her husband drank what he earned or could not earn enough to keep them, she had to “slave day and night to make ends meet in her poor household.” After Vissarion had gone to Tiflis, it was probably easier, for she had to care only for herself and Joseph. She washed clothes, baked bread, cleaned, and sewed. She kept him clothed and well fed, so that he grew into a strong healthy boy with exceptional energy and stamina.

  Ekaterina was deeply religious, but it was also for social reasons that she decided Joseph should enter the priesthood. The emancipation of the serfs had opened the gates of the theological colleges to peasant boys of exceptional ability. Ordained as a priest, he would marry and have charge of a parish; he would move up in the world and, while serving God, he would enjoy ease and security such as she had never known. This was her consuming ambition for her son, and she worked hard to achieve it.

  Gori boasted four schools, including the elementary theological school in which Ekaterina managed to enroll her son. At this time, he spoke only Georgian, and she arranged for him to have lessons in Russian, the indispensable language. Also, she obtained for him a monthly allowance of three rubles. She earned ten rubles as a laundress and cleaner at the school. On this meager income, she maintained herself and Joseph during the next five years.

  Two events threatened her plans with disaster. In 1886, Joseph became desperately ill with smallpox. His tough constitution pulled him through, but his face was always to be deeply pock-marked. The second threat was the opposition of her husband, who was determine to apprentice the boy to his trade. “You want my son to be a priest, a church official, don’t you?” he expostulated. “You’ll never live to see it happen! Yes, I’m a cobbler and my son will be a cobbler like me.”

  One day, probably in 1889, Vissarion came to Gori and took his son away to the Adelkhanov factory in Tiflis. It was a stormy family event. His wife and neighbors tried to dissuade him, but he stubbornly insisted his son must be apprenticed in the shoe factory. Details of the struggle over Joseph’s future are not known, but Ekaterina had the last word, for the boy returned to school in Gori.

  Stalin never mentioned this episode, and, indeed, his silence generally about his father may have been due to the hatred he felt for this man who had beaten him and his mother and had shamed them both by his drunkenness. Though he was only eleven when his father died in 1890, stabbed to death in a drunken brawl, his experiences probably left only grim memories.

  For his mother he felt a strong and enduring love. She was a woman of high principles, puritanical in outlook, and stubborn. She was strict and beat him at times, but no doubt she also indulged him. As a boy, he was close to her and appreciated that her life was hard. It was to become extremely lonely: The son whom she adored went to Tiflis at the age of fifteen. He came home to her for short periods during the next five years, but then he virtually passed out of her life. She was to hear about him constantly, but by then he belonged to another world; he had become the great leader and ruler of Russia, remote from Georgia and even more remote from the simple surroundings of her life.

  Ekaterina remained a devout woman of simple, even austere, tastes. Stalin spoke of her as “an intelligent woman,” although uneducated, and he respected her for her upright character. Concerned about her lonely way of life, he persuaded her to move to Moscow, and for a short time, she stayed in the Kremlin. But the change was too great. She returned to the quiet warmth and the familiar ways of Georgia.

  A photograph, taken in 1932, shows the face of an old lady in black Georgian costume. The mouth is firm and sensitive, but the expression of the eyes is sad and bewildered. Two years later, when her grandchildren paid her a visit, they found her half-seated on a narrow iron cot in her small room in the old palace in Tiflis; she had been offered more luxurious accommodation, but this was her choice. The grandchildren had little communication with her, because only one of them understood Georgian. Their visit apparently moved her deeply, for she was in tears much of the time.

  She never understood the high office of her son and the adulation surrounding him. When he went to see her shortly before she died, she said to him, “What a pity you never became a priest!” It was the great regret of her life. Stalin used to recount the remark with approval of “her scorn for what he’d accomplished, for the clamour and world glory.” He, too, was little concerned with the panoply of high office, and like her, he was also austere in his way of life. In 1936, aged about eighty, she died.

  Joseph spent five years at the Gori Theological School. His mother no doubt impressed on him the need to work hard, but he was by nature fiercely competitive; he had to excel and to prove himself better than others. He was naturally intelligent and gifted with an exceptional memory. His marks were always high, and he was regarded as the “best student,” leaving the school in July 1894, aged fourteen, with a certificate of honor. The school authorities recommended him for a place in the Tiflis Theological Seminary. For the son of a humble family whose father’s drunkenness and sordid death were doubtless known to the priests, the recommendation was a mark of faith in the boy’s ability and future.

  Iremashvili described Joseph as being at this time thin and wiry with an aquiline nose and narrow pock-marked face, his eyes dark, lively, and disturbing. Although small in build, he was strong and the best wrestler in the school. But he was “different from other children,” and disliked for his surly, bullying manner. Like many men of ability who are small physically and suffer from poverty, lowly birth, or physical disability, he was aggressive and eager to assert himself. Iremashvili wrote that “as a child and youth he was a good friend so long as one submitted to his imperious will.”

  While he was at school in Gori, Joseph fell seriously ill again. This time it was blood poisoning, which affected his left arm. Speaking of this illness years later to his sister-in-law, Anna Alliluyeva, he remarked, “I don’t know what saved me then, my strong constitution or the ointment of a village quack.” It left him with a slight shortening and withering of the left arm. Leon Trotsky noted that in later years, he wore a warm glove on his left hand, even at sessions of the Politburo. This further disability no doubt intensified his sense of disadvantage and his need to assert himself.

  At school, Joseph became a voracious reader and, according to Iremashvili, read “almost all the books” in the Gori Library. Emelyan Yaroslavsky stated that at this time, Stalin read Karl Marx and Charles Darwin and became an atheist. When a schoolfellow spoke of God, Joseph cut him short. “You know they deceive us. There is no God. . . . I’ll lend you a book to read; it will show you that the world and all living things are quite different from what you imagined, and all this talk about God is sheer nonsense.” This incident, if true, probably took place later when as a student at the seminary, he certainly lost his faith. It is unlikely, too, that Marxist ideas were known outside a small circle of intellectuals in Tiflis at this time. It was claimed, nevertheless, that Joseph was able to obtain this book and other works from a private bookshop in the town.

  Two years
after he had started at the school, there was a drastic change in teaching. Georgian had always been the language of instruction, but in 1890, as part of Alexander III’s rigorously enforced policy of Russification, all instruction was given in Russian, and Georgian became officially a foreign language, taught in two lessons a week.

  Vano Ketskhoveli, one of Joseph’s schoolfellows, wrote that “in the upper classes of Gori school we became acquainted with Georgian literature, but we had no mentor to guide our development and give a definite direction to our thoughts. Chavchavadze’s poem ‘Kako the Robber’ made a deep impression on us. Kazbegi’s heroes awakened in our youthful hearts a love for our country and each of us on leaving school was inspired with an eagerness to serve his country. But none of us had a clear idea what form this service should take.”

  This love for their country and its literature was all the more understandable because Georgia has a romantic history and a rich cultural heritage. Joseph was attracted by the romantic Georgian heroes. He read Shota Rustaveli’s classic, Knight in the Panther’s Skin, but was most impressed by Alexander Kazbegi’s stories of the mountain rebel, Koba (The Implacable). He began to use Koba as a nickname; later it was to be the name he used most frequently until about 1910 when he started calling himself Koba Stalin and then finally Joseph Stalin.

  The Caucasian isthmus was on one of the ancient invasion routes. Scythians, Cimmerians, Greeks, Arabs, Mongols, Turks, Persians, and finally the Russians had occupied the land. Georgia, like Armenia, the other Christian nation in Transcaucasia, settled down under Russian rule. The Georgians saw the tsar as their natural protector against Turks and Persians, and they looked to Moscow as the center of Orthodoxy. Moreover, the Georgian nobility and gentry were numerous and impoverished. Many seized the opportunity to go north, attracted by the glittering court of St. Petersburg and the rewards to be won in the Russian service.

  Throughout these centuries, despite the destruction wrought by conquerors, the loss of lives in innumerable wars, the insatiable demands by Turks, Persians, and others for Caucasian slaves, and the migration to the north, Georgians, drawing strength from their ancient culture, managed to endure as a nation.

  Georgians tend to be tall and lean with dark complexion and black hair. They are said to be wild, unpredictable, impetuous, generous and hospitable, animated in conversation, a laughing nation of poets and orators, and great drinkers of the wines they produce.

  Generalizations about national character are at best approximate, but often they contain elements of truth. Joseph, however, was not at all typical except perhaps for certain physical features. Early in his career, he began to think of himself as a Russian and to scorn Georgians, perhaps because they were pleasure-loving, ebullient, romantic people who so easily lost touch with reality.

  Tiflis, the capital of Georgia, is in the hot, dusty western region of the country. It is an ancient city, with spacious squares and avenues surrounded by narrow, crooked streets, enclosed by crowding flat-roofed houses and bazaars where traders from Turkey and Persia as well as Georgians and Armenians jostled and bargained.

  At the end of the nineteenth century, its population was over 150,000, of which the Armenians, Georgians, and Russians were the main elements. As the seat of the tsar’s viceroy and the government center of Transcaucasia, which embraced not only Georgia but also parts of Armenia and Azerbaijan, Tiflis was a bustling polyglot city.

  The Russian government, recognizing the importance of Transcaucasia as a frontier zone, had built a military highway to strengthen its defenses. But the region was taking on a new economic significance. Oil and mining industries were developing rapidly with the aid of foreign capital and expertise. In 1867, work began on a railway from Tiflis to the Black Sea, and the line was soon extended from Tiflis to Baku on the Caspian Sea.

  For fifteen-year-old Joseph, the move from Gori to this bustling city must have been a momentous change. He had always lived at home, cared for by his mother, and now he was alone in strange surroundings. Ekaterina, too, was alone, but she could take pride in the fact that her son had gained a place in the Tiflis Theological Seminary, which was held in great respect by Orthodox Georgians as their foremost institution of higher education.

  Like seminaries in other parts of the Empire, its purpose was not only to educate but also to train students for the religious life. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, a fever of unrest was sweeping through Europe. In Russia, it erupted with special force in the seminaries.

  By the time of Joseph’s enrollment, the Tiflis seminary had become a center of opposition to Russian authorities. In 1885, Sylvestr Dzhibladze, a student and later revolutionary leader, was banished to Siberia for assaulting principal Pavel Chudetsky, who had spoken of Georgian as “a language for dogs,” and the following year, Chudetsky was murdered by another student. In March 1890, the students went on strike for a week. Late in 1893, Mikhail Tskhakaya and Lado Ketskhoveli, both later active revolutionaries, led another student strike. The police closed the seminary, and eighty-seven students were expelled.

  The archives of the Tiflis police, published in 1930, revealed that as early as 1873, there were reports of students reading forbidden books, and the works of Charles Darwin, Henry Thomas Buckle, John Stuart Mill, and Nikolay Chernyshevsky were mentioned. A search in the seminary brought to light copies of Ernest Renan’s La Vie de Jésus and Victor Hugo’s Napoléon le Petit. Three teachers were dismissed for their “liberal spirit.” The police archives stressed, however, that ardent nationalism rather than liberal or revolutionary ideas was the real source of the students’ unrest.

  At the time of Joseph’s arrival, the principal of the seminary was a Russian monk, Georgiy Germogenes, and the inspector David Abashidze, a Georgian, eager to gain promotion from the Russian authorities. Remembering the murder of Chudetsky, they were concerned for their own safety and alarmed by the rebellious mood of the students. They enforced discipline strictly, and ever watchful, they spied on the students and often searched the dormitories.

  “Locked within barrack walls we felt like prisoners, guiltless of any crime, who were forced to spend a long term in jail,” Iremashvili wrote. Each day in the seminary followed a rigid routine. All gathered in the chapel at 7:00 a.m. for the lengthy Orthodox service. Lessons and prayers alternated during the day. With special permission, a student might go out for two hours at the end of classes, but he had to return by 5:00 p.m., when the gates were locked. Discipline was harsh. The punishment for small misdemeanors was solitary confinement in one of the dark cells in the basement. Persecution by the monks, poor food, and lack of fresh air and exercise broke the health and spirit of many boys.

  During his first two years in the seminary, Joseph evidently impressed his teachers as an able and obedient student. He was eighth in class in the first year and fifth in the second. With his quick brain and retentive memory, he was able to absorb the theological training and would never lose his feeling for the rhythms and poetry of the liturgy and of the New and Old Testaments. Moreover, the curriculum included mathematics, Greek, and Latin, as well as Russian literature and history. Although formal and limited in range, it provided a sound basic education.

  At the same time, he was also learning the skills and cunning of the conspirator. He came to hate the seminary and its monks, and what he later called its “humiliating regime.” He was readily infected with the rebellious spirit that was rife among the students. But the monks had no inkling of his real feelings until later when Joseph no longer bothered to conceal them.

  Iremashvili, who entered the seminary at the same time, evidently held him in some awe. Joseph stood apart from his fellow students and was not popular. The boy who in the Gori Theological School had felt a desperate need to assert himself over others was becoming more formidable. In the grim atmosphere of the seminary, he was discovering his own strength and learning self-discipline.

  Joseph began reading more widely. There was a circulating library i
n Tiflis from which he borrowed books. His reading embraced not only Georgian poetry but also Russian and Western classics. Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Anton Chekhov, and Leo Tolstoy became his favorite Russian writers. He read translations of Honoré de Balzac, Hugo, and William Thackeray, whose Vanity Fair made an impression on him. He also absorbed books on history, economics, and biology. Noteworthy titles on his list were Darwin’s Descent of Man, Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, Buckle’s History of Civilization in England, Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, Charles Letourneau’s Literary Evolution of the Nations, and Dmitri Mendeleyev’s Chemistry. It was a bold reading program for a young theology student. As with the liturgy and the Bible, he did not forget what he read. Years later, he would quote and refer to many of these books.

  Joseph also wrote poetry during his first two years in the seminary. He never referred to his verses and neither acknowledged nor denied authorship. Five poems were published in the second half of 1893 and a sixth poem in the following year. They were forgotten until December 1939 when, as part of the celebrations of his sixtieth birthday, the Tiflis newspaper, Zarya Vostoka (Dawn of the East) reprinted them under the banner heading Stikhi Yunogo Stalina (Verses of the Young Stalin).

  The poems are romantic and strongly nationalistic in spirit He dedicated one to the memory of Prince Rafael Eristavi, a popular Georgian poet, and in it, he expressed his great love of his country. The other poem which claims special attention is “To the Moon,” an impassioned lyric invoking the Georgian martyrs who had fallen to foreign oppressors. If written by Joseph, the poems are evidence of his fervor as a Georgian patriot at this time.