After giving interviews in which I said that I was writing a book about “Stalin, the First Revolutionary Tsar,” I started receiving a lot of letters.
I was amused by this repetition of what happened with my previous book, about the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II.
These letters contain no sensational information, but they convey invaluable details about a vanished age, which has left behind a multitude of falsifications and the most mendacious literature in the world. For the most part, these letters were written by elderly people who had long ago withdrawn from active life and wished before departing this world to record what they had witnessed. They rarely say anything about themselves. As a rule, I know only a name and address (in some cases only the city from which the letter has come). This is not the result of carelessness, but of fear. That fear, inculcated in the people from their childhood by their Father and Teacher, will die only when they die. In my book I simply indicate the names of each of these unselfish coauthors and the town from which he or she wrote to me. I thank all of my voluntary helpers, inhabitants of the vanished empire called the USSR, yet another Russian Atlantis.
INTRODUCTION: AN ENIGMATIC STORY
I often recall a conversation which took place in the latter half of the sixties. I was young, but already the author of two fashionable plays, when I got to know Elena Sergeevna Bulgakova, the widow of the most mystical writer of the Stalin era. In Stalin’s lifetime, Mikhail Bulgakov was famous for several forbidden plays and for one which was staged, The Days of the Turbins. Stalin had a strange, barely comprehensible love for this play and went to see it at the Moscow Arts Theater on innumerable occasions.
In the sixties most of Bulgakov’s works were banned, as before, and many fantastic stories were told about his life. The one that interested me was the story of his play about Stalin, and I asked Elena Sergeevna about it. The conversation that resulted seemed to me so remarkable that I wrote it down in my diary.
Myself: I have heard that in 1939 there was some suggestion that Mikhail Sergeevich should write a play about Stalin.
Elena Sergeevna: Perfectly true. It was indeed suggested. The director of the Moscow Arts Theater came to see us. He was the one who suggested writing such a play for Stalin’s jubilee. Misha was undecided at first but finally agreed—he had a special attitude to Stalin. He wrote an interesting romantic play about the young Koba [the young Stalin’s Party pseudonym]. At first everything went well. The theater accepted the play. Even the bureaucrats in charge of cultural matters were delighted. [Later I checked Elena Sergeevna’s story against her published diary. On May 11, 1939, she had written, “B. (Bulgakov) reads his story at the Committee for the Arts. They liked the play very much.”] The theater intended to stage the play in December 1939, in honor of its hero’s sixtieth birthday. But then they submitted it to Stalin, and he vetoed it. That’s about all there is to be said.
If I had not been a Soviet playwright myself at the time, I should have left it at that. As it was I recognized at once the bizarre nature of what I had been told.
It was 1939, remember—at the height of the Stalinist terror. The whole country is in the grip of fear. Any ideological error is denounced as a hostile act. Who would have dared at such a time to commission from Bulgakov, the author of several forbidden plays, a play for the anniversary of the Leader himself? Commission it, what’s more, for the country’s premier theater? Those responsible for the arts at the time were already frightened out of their wits: who among them would have dared take such a responsibility upon himself? No one, of course, except … except the hero of the projected play himself, the unlikely devotee of Days of the Turbins.
So then, it can obviously only have been Stalin who commissioned the play. Another question then arises.
As a playwright myself, I knew very well that bureaucrats lived in constant fear. Even in the relatively safe sixties the cultural administrators did their best to avoid making decisions. Surely in the dreadful year 1939 bureaucrats half dead with fear would not suddenly have found the courage to enthuse over a play by Bulgakov, who had made several mistakes in the past. It seems improbable! Or, rather, it becomes probable on one assumption: that the customer had approved it himself.
Why then did he subsequently ban it? I continued my conversation with Elena Sergeevna:
Myself: When was the play discussed?
Elena Sergeevna: In the summer … it was July.
Myself: And when was it banned?
Elena Sergeevna: In August.
Myself: Something must have happened between those two events?
Elena Sergeevna (smiling; she could have read my thoughts): Misha arranged with the theater to go to Georgia. He was anxious to talk to eyewitnesses of events there, who remembered Koba in his youth. There were not many left by then, Koba had destroyed them all.… We set off, the designer, the producer, I myself, and Misha … Misha dreamt of working in Georgian archives.
Myself: In the archives?
Elena Sergeevna: Yes, well, he’d been writing without any documents. When he asked the theater to help him consult documents about Stalin’s youth, the answer was that no such documents existed. So he decided to look for himself. We set out in perfect comfort, in an international carriage. We were getting ready to enjoy a banquet in our compartment when a telegram caught up with us: “Journey no longer necessary. Return to Moscow.” In Moscow Misha was informed that the play had been read in Stalin’s secretariat, and the verdict was that no one must try to turn Stalin into a literary image and put invented words into his mouth. Stalin himself was supposed to have said, “All young people are alike, why write a play about the young Stalin?”
Stalin’s explanation was a strange one. Many works about the young Stalin were published in those years. But they were written just as the play had been—without documents. Their authors made use of official information about the life of the great revolutionary Koba. Of course!
Bulgakov’s fatal mistake, obviously, was wanting to consult archival documents. The moment he tried to go beyond the limits of that official information, the play was doomed. The episode rebounded on the author with fatal results. Bulgakov fell sick and died.
I remembered myself as a child, sitting in my room; in the adjoining room my father was talking to the writer Pavlenko, one of the most highly regarded writers of the Stalin era. My father was earning our livelihood by adapting Pavlenko’s novels for the stage. Pavlenko had written screenplays for films in which Stalin himself was portrayed. That day Pavlenko and my father were discussing future plans. The door was ajar, and I heard my father calmly asking, “Why don’t you write about the youth of Joseph Vissarionovich?… Nobody has done it properly. You lived in the Caucasus for a long time …”
Pavlenko interrupted so harshly that I didn’t recognize his voice: “It’s no good trying to describe the sun before it has risen.”
MORE RIDDLES: THE VANISHING BIRTHDAYS
“Stalin (Dzhugashvili), Joseph Vissarionovich, was born on December 21 (December 9, Old Style), 1879.” That is the birth date you will find in many of the world’s encyclopedias. It is a date I remember well. I committed the one and only crime of my life because of that date. In one of the lower forms at school we sent him birthday greetings every year. In a reverent silence I described my love for him. Like all my classmates I was a believer, and I trembled as I imagined him reading our letters. But back home, as I was telling my father what I had written, I realized with horror that I had made a grammatical mistake. And he, Stalin, would learn that I was illiterate. It was more than I could bear. As soon as it got light I went to school, broke a window, and crept into the staff room. I found the pile of compositions. What a stroke of luck: they hadn’t been checked yet. So I corrected my mistake.
Now, ages later, I am sitting in the famous Central Party Archive. I have before me a photocopy of the entry in the records of the Cathedral of the Assumption at Gori registering the birth of Joseph Dzhugashvili.
1878. Bor
n December 6. Christened December 17, parents Vissarion Ivanovich Dzhugashvili, peasant, and his lawful wedded wife, Ekaterina Georgievna, residents of the township of Gori. Godfather—Tsikhitatrishvili, peasant, resident of Gori.
The sacrament was performed by Archpriest Khakalov, assisted by Sub-deacon Kvinikidze.
Was he then born a whole year and three days earlier than his official date of birth? The date which the whole country had celebrated solemnly for so many years? Had it been celebrating the wrong date all those years? The date given here is no mistake. The same archive contains young Joseph Dzhugashvili’s school-leaving certificate, issued by the Gori Junior Seminary. It reads: “Born on the sixth day of the month of December 1878.” Here too we find a curriculum vitae written by Stalin himself in 1920. The year 1878 is given in his own handwriting.
The official date of birth is indeed fictitious. But when was it invented? And why?
The first question is easily answered: the fictitious date first appears immediately after Stalin’s official elevation. In April 1922 Lenin made him Secretary General—head of the Party. And as early as December 1922, Stalin’s secretary Tovstukha makes out a new CV for him, in which he alters the year of his birth to 1879, and the day to December 21. From then onward, our hero avoided writing his own CV. His secretaries did it for him. The fictitious date was entered in their handwriting. As always, it had nothing to do with him. The false date became official. But again—why?
I am sitting in the former Party Archive with Tovstukha’s papers before me. He was Stalin’s confidential assistant until 1935. He died in that year, luckily for him, inasmuch as after that date Stalin would destroy most of his entourage.
I peruse Tovstukha’s papers, trying to find some sort of clue, but he left no diaries, no personal records of any kind. For that matter, those whom he served behaved likewise. On principle. Neither Stalin nor Lenin nor any of their associates kept diaries. For the revolutionary, nothing personal is supposed to exist. Only the Party and its cause. This useful principle enabled them to take their Party’s secrets to the grave.
During a break from my work, an old man comes up to me in the corridor—one of those Party ancients who while away their leisure hours in the archives. He does not introduce himself, and I do not ask his name. I know from experience that it pays not to be inquisitive if you hope to obtain interesting information. This is what he says:
I see you’re interested in Tovstukha. I used to meet him at one time, in fact I even worked with him. He was a tall, thin man, typical intellectual. Died of tuberculosis. I visited him in the government sanatorium, the Pines, when he lay dying. He asked me to play the revolutionary songs of his youth on my guitar. He wept. He didn’t want to die. Stalin had him buried in the Kremlin wall. He appreciated Tovstukha’s services. Tovstukha had been his secretary. But, no less important, he was effectively in charge of the Party Archive. He collected all the Lenin documents. Stalin used those documents to destroy his opponents. One of his secretaries, Bazhanov, escaped abroad. He had a lot to say about Tovstukha in his book. But he didn’t realize what Tovstukha’s most important service to Stalin was. It happened when Stalin was already the country’s Boss. In 1929 it was decided to make Stalin’s fiftieth birthday the occasion for nationwide celebrations. Tovstukha began removing from the archives all documents concerning Stalin, particularly his prerevolutionary career, ostensibly in order to write a full biography. But no full biography appeared. The mountain brought forth a mouse: the result was the misbegotten Short Biography. He collected the documents to make sure that they were never published. Putting it more precisely, he suppressed documents. But I don’t think it was his own idea. We were all his servants. We all did whatever Stalin, the Boss, wanted. As soon as he got hold of documents, Tovstukha referred them to the Boss. And they often didn’t return. The explanation given to people like me, who worked with Tovstukha, was Stalin’s modesty: he didn’t like superfluous mentions of his past. And the superfluous included all documents about his life before October 1917. People quoted a remark of his: “I did nothing worth mentioning compared with other revolutionaries.”
I often remembered the old man’s words as I looked through Tovstukha’s papers. Take his correspondence with the accredited historian of the Party, Emelyan Yaroslavsky. In 1935 Yaroslavsky contemplated writing a biography of the Leader. He wrote to Tovstukha saying that he would like to consult sources for Stalin’s life before October 1917 and asked what Tovstukha thought about his idea of writing a detailed biography of the Leader. Tovstukha replied, “I feel skeptical … the materials for this purpose are practically nonexistent. The archival sources are poor, they get you nowhere.” Yaroslavsky was experienced enough to know who was dictating Tovstukha’s answer, and there was an immediate change of plan. He wrote his biography of Stalin—but without using new documents.
There is a widely known story that the reason Stalin cooled toward Gorky was the great proletarian writer’s stubborn reluctance to write the Leader’s biography. But Tovstukha’s archive points to a different explanation. Gorky evidently asked Tovstukha for materials to write the biography. And Tovstukha replied: “I am sending you, rather late in the day, some materials relevant to the Stalin biography. As I warned you, the materials are pretty meager.”
This delay in answering the great proletarian writer, in such a context, could mean only one thing: that the biography should not be written. Gorky promptly dropped the idea.
All these stories show that Stalin did not want to recall the life of the revolutionary Koba and was perhaps so eager to distance himself from it that he even changed the date of his birth.
What was it in Koba’s career that inspired such obvious unease in Stalin?
ONE
SOSO: HIS LIFE AND DEATH
1
THE LITTLE ANGEL
“Look at the map. You will see that the Caucasus is the center of the world.”
—An English traveler
SOSO’S TOWN
It is 1878. The little Georgian town of Gori, birthplace of Joseph (Iosif) Dzhugashvili, slumbers against a background of distant mountains.
Soso, his mother called him, Georgian fashion.
Maxim Gorky, who was to be Stalin’s favorite writer, wandering around the Caucasus at the end of the nineteenth century, described Gori as follows:
Gori, a town at the mouth of the river Kura, quite small, no bigger than a fair-sized village. There is a high hill in the middle of it. On the hill stands a fortress. The whole place has a picturesque wildness all its own. The sultry sky over the town, the noisy, turbulent waters of the Kura, mountains in the near distance, with their “City of Caves,” and farther away the Caucasus range, with its sprinkling of snow that never melts.
This sets the scene in which our hero’s life begins. An ominous note is introduced into this idyllic landscape by the grim ruins looking down on the town from a steep cliff—the ruins of the castle from which Georgian feudal princes once ruled that region and waged bloody war on the Georgian kings.
We cross the bridge over the Kura into the little town. Gori wakes at sunrise, before the burning heat sets in. Herdsmen go from yard to yard to collect the cows. Sleepy people sit on little balconies. Church doors are unlocked and old women in black hurry to the morning service. Rafts speed down the boisterous Kura. Listless water carriers follow the movements of the daring raftsmen as they fill the leather bottles which they will then carry from house to house on the backs of their skinny nags.
The long main street bisects the town. It used to be called Tsarskaya Street, because Tsar Nicholas I once visited Gori. Later, of course, it became Stalin Street. Little shops and two-storied houses hide among trees. This is the lower part of the town, in which the rich live. From Gori, Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Jewish merchants once traded with the whole world. As you would expect in an Eastern town, the center of its life was the market—a typical oriental bazaar. Along its dark aisles innumerable little shops sold everything imagi
nable, from matches to precious stones. Tailors measured their clients outside in the street: the tailor sprinkled soot on the ground, the client lay down, and the tailor sat on him, pressing him into the soot. Nearby, barbers would give haircuts and shampoos, or draw teeth with pliers. Shopkeepers drank wine and played nardy (a board game like chess). The town madman might turn up in the market, followed by a crowd of teasing boys.
Little Soso often came to bazaar. His mother did the laundry for a Jewish merchant who traded there. Soso never teased the madman. Soso defended him. The Jewish merchant was softhearted. He pitied the madman and often gave Soso presents for being kind to him. Soso shared the money with us to buy sweets. Although Soso’s family was poor, he despised money. (Letter from N. Goglidze, Kiev)
Life was quite different in the upper town, where the future Leaders father, the cobbler Vissarion (Beso) Dzhugashvili, lived. He had set up house in a hovel after marrying Ekaterina (Keke) Georgievna Geladze, who had been born into the family of a serf. Her father died early, but although money was short her mother somehow saw to it that Keke learned to read and write. She was not yet sixteen when she met Dzhugashvili, who had only recently arrived in Gori from his family’s little village of Didi Lilo.
A DANGEROUS GREAT-GRANDFATHER
There is a story attached to the family’s arrival in Didi Lilo. Beso’s forebears had previously lived in a mountain hamlet in the Liakhvis Ravine. Like Keke’s, they were serfs. Their masters were Georgian warrior princes—the princely Asatiani family. Soso’s great-grandfather Zaza Dzhugashvili took part in a bloody peasant revolt. He was seized, cruelly flogged, and thrown into jail. He escaped, rebelled again, was arrested again, and again escaped. That was when he settled in the village of Didi Lilo, near Tiflis (now Tbilisi), got married, and at last found peace.
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