Stalin

by Ian Grey

  In the course of his interview with Stalin, Emil Ludwig mentioned that Czech statesman T. G. Mazaryk had claimed to be a socialist at the age of six. He then asked Stalin what had made him a socialist and when. The reply was: “I cannot assert that I was already drawn to socialism at the age of six. Not even at the age of ten or twelve. I joined the revolutionary movement when fifteen years old, when I became connected with underground groups of Russian Marxists then living in Transcaucasia. These groups exerted great influence on me and instilled in me a taste for underground Marxist literature. . . . It was a different matter at the Orthodox theological seminary which I was then attending. In protest against the outrageous regime and Jesuitical methods prevalent in the seminary, I was ready to become and actually did become a revolutionary, a believer in Marxism as a truly revolutionary teaching.”

  It is more probable, however, that Joseph became a Marxist not in 1894 but two or three years later. The harsh regime had certainly antagonized him, but he always hated authority. He could not accept opposition or criticism from fellow students and retaliated with sarcasm and abuse. Iremashvili considered him to be intensely ambitious and interested not in Marxism, but in dominating others.

  The records of the seminary show that the model student who studied diligently during his first and second years was coming into conflict with the monks. In November 1896, an assistant supervisor, S. A. Murakhovsky, noted in the conduct book: “It appears that Dzhugashvili has a ticket to the cheap library from which he borrows books. Today I confiscated Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea in which I found the said library ticket. The principal, Father Germogenes, endorsed the entry with the ruling: ‘Confine him to the punishment cell for a prolonged period. I have already warned him once about an unsanctioned book, Ninety-three, by Victor Hugo.’”

  In March 1897, the same Murakhovsky made another entry: “At 11:00 a.m., I took away from Joseph Dzhugashvili Letourneau’s Literary Evolution of the Nations which he had borrowed from the cheap library. The library ticket was found in the book. Dzhugashvili was found reading the said book on the chapel stairs. This is the thirteenth time that this student has been discovered reading books borrowed from the cheap library. I handed the book to the Father Supervisor.”

  For Joseph, this must have been a time of uncertainty. He knew he had no vocation for the priesthood and had lost his belief in Orthodoxy. But he did not know what to do with his life. Sasha Tsulukidze and Lado Ketskhoveli, both older than Joseph, were the two remarkable men who influenced him most in this period. They were typical of the galaxy of young people who appeared in Russia at the turn of the century. All were brave, imaginative, and enterprising; but all were motivated by a bitter hatred of the existing order, believing that through destruction they were reaching toward a millennium in which the people would enjoy justice and plenty; at least the majority would enjoy it, the minority having been blown up or eliminated in some similar way.

  Tsulukidze, from a princely family, was an intellectual with literary ability. He was devoted to the revolutionary cause and contributed articles in Georgian to Kvali (The Furrow) and Iberia, the leading publications, seeking to explain and popularize Marxist theories. When he died of tuberculosis in June 1905, all Georgian revolutionaries attended his funeral, which developed into a popular demonstration. Joseph had his friend’s writings collected and published in book form in 1927 as a tribute to his memory.

  Lado Ketskhoveli was very different in character from Tsulukidze, the feverish intellectual. He was a tireless and enterprising man of action. He had attended the same theological school in Gori and the seminary in Tiflis and then had embarked on a revolutionary career. After the famous strike in the seminary in December 1893, he had gone to Kiev, where he was arrested, held in prison for three months, and kept under police surveillance after his release. In 1897, he returned to Tiflis and worked fanatically in the revolutionary underground.

  The two friends encouraged Joseph’s interest in Marxism. They were probably his sponsors when he joined Messame Dassy (The Third Group), the first Marxist social democratic organization in Georgia. Its founders were Noi Zhordania, a former student of the seminary and later president of the independent Republic of Georgia (1918–21), and K. Chkheidze, G. Tseretelli, and Sylvestr Dzhibladze, all of whom were to hold prominent positions until, as moderates, they were displaced. Noi Zhordania was the leader of the group.

  Messame Dassy was a legal organization, functioning with police approval. It published Kvali, a daily newspaper in Georgian, and Moambeh (The Herald), a monthly journal. Tsulukidze and Ketskhoveli were strongly critical of both publications. They wanted defiance, the excitement of conspiracy and dramatic, violent action against the tsarist regime.

  Membership of Messame Dassy was nevertheless a major step in Joseph’s development. His interest in Marxism broadened through discussion with his two friends and through his contacts with the other members. He was given the responsibility of running a workers’ study circle. Recalling these meetings in later years, Stalin said: “I received my first lessons of practical work in the apartment of Comrade Sturua in the presence of Dzhibladze (he was also one of my teachers), Chodrishvili, Chkheidze, Bochorishvili, Ninua, and other foremost workers of Tiflis.” It was a new and stimulating experience for the nineteen-year-old revolutionary to be lecturing to workers. But he was still a seminarist, and the severe limits on his freedom undoubtedly irked him all the more at this time when he was finding so much to do.

  In his Memoirs, written in Paris in the 1930s, Noi Zhordania recalled:

  At the end of 1898, I was head of Kvali. One day a young man appeared at the editorial offices and presented himself: “I am Dzhugashvili, a student at the Theological Seminary.” Having requested that I hear him out, he began with: “I am a faithful reader of your journal and your articles. All of them have made a great impression on me. I have decided to quit the seminary and spend my time amongst the workers. Give me your advice.”

  His decision pleased me. In the Tiflis socialdemocratic organization, there were too few propagandists. But before I gave him any advice I considered it necessary to verify the mental equipment of this young man. When I posed several questions about history, sociology and political economy, I was surprised that he had only a superficial notion concerning all of them. His political knowledge had come from the articles in Kvali and Kautsky’s Erfurt programme. I explained that it would be difficult to function under these conditions. Our workers were curious and wanted knowledge. When they were persuaded that a propagandist was ignorant, they would turn away and refuse to listen. I advised Dzhugashvili to remain one more year in the seminary and to undertake some self-education. “I’ll think about it,” he replied and departed.

  Zhordania was probably patronizing toward the young student and, like other embittered and impotent political enemies writing their memoirs in exile, he tried to denigrate this man who had become supreme ruler. Certainly, he exaggerated Joseph’s lack of education. Then nineteen years old, he had shown himself to be an able student and he had read widely, interesting himself closely in Marxism and revolutionary ideas. His approach to the editor of Kvali, who was one of the best known political writers in Georgia at this time, nevertheless seems likely. Life in the seminary had become intolerable. Membership of Messame Dassy and the experience of talking to the study circle of workers had given him a sense of purpose. He sought advice as he felt his way toward the final decision to give himself wholly to revolutionary work.

  Soviet accounts of Joseph’s political activities during 1898 attribute to him an importance that could hardly be justified at this state. It was said that he had become the foremost critic and opponent of Zhordania’s views and that he was a leading force among the railway workers, organizing them to stage a major strike in December 1898. But he was then still at the seminary and an apprentice revolutionary. He would have had little influence among the railwaymen and would have made no headway in opposing the highly respected leaders of
Messame Dassy.

  By the end of 1898, Joseph’s attitude toward the seminary authorities had become insolent and defiant. In December 1898, the assistant supervisor wrote in the conduct book: “In the course of a search of students of the fifth class by members of the board of supervision, Joseph Dzhugashvili tried several times to enter into argument with them, expressing dissatisfaction with the repeated searches of students and declaring that such searches were never made in other seminaries. Dzhugashvili is generally disrespectful and rude toward persons in authority and persistently refuses to bow to one of the masters [S. A. Murakhovsky], as the latter has repeatedly complained to the board of supervision.”

  Joseph’s punishment was solitary confinement in the cells for five hours.

  Finally, on May 27, 1899, the council of the seminary expelled him “for having missed his examinations for an unexplained reason.” The decision came as an anticlimax. The monks had not expelled him for leading a revolution among the students. He himself later stated that he had been “turned out of the theological seminary for propagating Marxism.” His mother was insistent that he had not been expelled and that she herself had taken him away. Speaking in 1930 to H. R. Knickerbocker, an American journalist, she said: “I brought him home on account of his health. When he entered the seminary he was as strong as a boy could be. But overwork up to the age of nineteen pulled him down, and the doctors told me that he might develop tuberculosis. So I took him away from school. He did not want to leave. But I took him away. He was my only son.”

  It is clear that, whatever the real reason for his departure from the seminary, Joseph himself did not make the decision. But now that he was free, he threw himself into the career of a dedicated professional revolutionary, and became Koba, “The Implacable.”

  At the time of leaving the seminary, Koba’s instinctive feeling of rebellion was growing into a savage need to challenge and destroy the tsarist regime. Eagerly he read all the revolutionary material he could lay his hands on and talked with others who were fired by the new spirit of revolution, but he could not yet find the kind of guidance and answers he needed. The writings of Georgy Plekhanov and of Lenin stimulated his ideas, but living far away in Georgia, he had no real contact with the revolutionary movement.

  Russian revolutionaries, living abroad, were sundered by furious, often vicious, polemics. Plekhanov, the father of Russian social democracy, considered himself the arbiter in all matters concerning the movement in Russia. He was incensed by the heresy of “Economism,” which argued that workers should concentrate on improving wages and conditions. A more serious heresy, perpetrated by the “Legal Marxists,” denounced violent revolution. To all orthodox Marxists, this was “revisionism” and “reformism,” terms of strongest communist censure. Lenin, who was emerging as the dominant leader of the Russian movement, regarded any argument that ruled out violent revolution as the worst form of apostasy.

  Underlying these heresies was the basic question of the applicability of Marxism to Russia. It was a Western doctrine, conceived and rooted in the industrialized, capitalist societies of Western Europe. In embracing Marxism, Plekhanov, Pavel Axelrod, Julius Martov, Lenin, and others had accepted that Russia must reach the same stage of industrialization before there would be a mass proletariat, able to rise in revolution and assert its power.

  The fact that in Russia at the end of the century the peasants comprised well over 100 million of the total population (excluding Finland) of 170 million made this goal extremely remote. From about 1892, however, under the able direction of Count Sergei Witte, Minister of Finance and Economy, industrialization developed with astonishing momentum, Plekhanov and others began to think that the goal of a mass proletariat might not be so far distant. But Lenin, impatient for action and power, realized that Marxism had to be adapted to Russian conditions.

  Returning from exile in February 1900, Lenin stayed briefly in Pskov and then moved to Munich. He was eager to convene a congress to outlaw all heresies and to restore unity to the Russian social democratic movement. He was also planning to produce a paper to be called Iskra (The Spark). In December 1900, the first issue was published in Leipzig. Copies were smuggled across the frontier and it at once became influential as the voice of the Marxist movement in Russia.

  Far away in Georgia, Joseph Dzhugashvili, or Koba as he now called himself, probably heard about the heresies and the wrangling among the Social Democrats abroad. He was not impressed, for he was intolerant of the émigré Marxists who lived in comfort in capitalist countries and devoted their time to internecine disputes. True revolutionaries faced risks while teaching and organizing the workers. But he was soon taking special interest in Iskra.

  Reliable information on his life and activities is scanty for the period from May 1889, when he left the seminary, until December 1905, when he attended the Tammerfors Conference and first met Lenin. Certain historians described him as leading a vast underground revolutionary movement in these years. To them, it was clear that he must have been a prodigy, like Athena who sprang from the head of Zeus, fully armed and uttering a war cry. Hostile writers seized on these early years as revealing his backwardness and inability to contribute to the movement.

  Trotsky wrote of his “slowness of intellect, lack of talent, and the general colourlessness of his physical and moral countenance.” Boris Souvarine, pointing to his lack of influence, rated him as having the qualifications of a noncommissioned officer. At this time, Koba may, indeed, have seemed a raw recruit, aggressive because unsure of himself in the company of intellectuals. He was a fringe member of the intelligentsia, without a professional or noble background. Among even the paznochintsi, an indeterminate class, his origins were humble. A bitter sense of social inferiority, intensified by his pock-marked face and deformed arm, must have been factors in his general awkwardness and aggressiveness toward others, including friends and colleagues, and in his self-effacement.

  This period was, nevertheless, an important stage in his long apprenticeship. He began learning in earnest from other revolutionaries and from workers, especially the railwaymen, who were the most awakened politically. He lived a clandestine existence outside society, hounded by the police. He is espied from time to time but then vanishes into the shadows. It was a grim, often squalid, way of life, relieved only by the sense of striving with a few comrades toward the goals of revolution and a new society. He was, however, well equipped for underground life. He had courage, self-discipline, patience, sharp intelligence, and a strong instinct for survival.

  After leaving the seminary, he may have spent some time with his mother in Gori, regaining his health. He earned money tutoring children of wealthy families in Tiflis and presumably lived in some worker’s hovel. Among his pupils was Semyon Ter-Petrosian, the audacious Armenian terrorist known as Kamo, who was to become his disciple and lieutenant.

  Toward the end of December 1899, Koba started work as a clerk in the Tiflis Geophysical Observatory. According to Vano Berdzenishvili, who had been expelled from the seminary in autumn 1899 and had begun working in the observatory in February of the following year, there were six observers. They included the brothers Vano and Lado Ketskhoveli. Vano later recalled that “we had to keep awake all night and make observations at stated intervals with the help of delicate instruments. The work demanded great nervous concentration and patience.” A police report at this time described Koba, however, not as an observer-meteorologist, but simply as a bookkeeper.

  Evidently, Koba found his job at the observatory congenial. The pay was low, but for the first time in his life, he had the privacy of a room of his own and, when not on duty, he was free. Iremashvili described Stalin’s room as bare and austere, but his table was always piled high with books and pamphlets, with the works of Plekhanov and Lenin prominent. He divided his free time between reading and leading discussions at meetings of workers’ groups. Berdzenishvili recalled later that Stalin “used to procure illegal pamphlets and Iskra and let us read them; but
where and from whom he got them none of us knew.”

  May Day 1900 was an important event for Koba. The Mayevka, as it was called, was illegal and had never been celebrated in Georgia. Koba took charge of preparations, according to Sergei Alliluyev, a railwayman who was his friend and later his father-in-law. Early in the morning, small groups of workers made their way to Salt Lake in the mountains beyond the outskirts of Tiflis, giving the password to pickets posted along the route. They carried banners with revolutionary slogans in Russian, Georgian, and Armenian, and two banners bore portraits of Marx and Friedrich Engels.

  In a mood of elation, 500 workers sang the “Marseillaise” and listened to speeches on the international proletariat and the coming fight for workers’ rights. Sergei Alliluyev mentioned only that Koba was one of the speakers. Georgy Ninua, however, recorded that Koba said: “We have grown so strong that next year we will be able to conduct the Mayevka not in mountain hollows, but on the main streets of Tiflis. . . . Our red flag must be in the centre of the city, so that tyranny will feel our strength.”

  Industrial unrest was mounting in Russia during these years, and in Georgia, the unrest had become acute. A wave of strikes swept through the factories in Tiflis between May and July 1900, and in August, the railwaymen staged a major strike. Koba, supported by M. I. Kalinin, a metalworker who was to become president of the Soviet Union, was said to have organized and led these strikes.

  In summer 1900, Viktor Kurnatovsky arrived in Tiflis. A tall, gaunt man who bent forward in company because he was hard of hearing, he was liked and respected in revolutionary circles. He had been an active terrorist, and while in exile, he had become the close companion of Lenin.