Stalin

by Edvard Radzinsky

  “ANGELIC VOICES”

  In 1888 Keke’s dream came true. Soso entered the Gori Church School. His mother had seen to it that he was as good as the rest of them. Keke decided to change her clientele: from then on she laundered and cleaned in his teachers’ houses.

  The Gori Church School was a big, two-story building. It had its own chapel in the upper story. It was there that another pupil, David Suliashvili, first saw him.

  It was a church fast, and three singers sang the penitential prayers. Those with the best voices were always selected and Soso was always one of these.… At vespers three boys in surplices chanted the prayers on their knees … the angelic voices of the three children … the golden chancel gates were open … the priest lifted up his hands to heaven, and we prostrated ourselves, filled with an ecstasy not of this world.

  Like Soso, David Suliashvili would complete his studies for the priesthood only to become a professional revolutionary instead. Subsequently, their paths parted: Suliashvili’s successful rival went on to become the country’s Leader and dispatch him to a prison camp, together with other old Bolsheviks.

  But for the moment they were kneeling in their little church. Who could have known that this angelic little boy would become the man who would destroy more people than all the wars in history?

  2

  CHILDHOOD RIDDLES

  THE THREE MUSKETEERS

  Mikhail Peradze (who also attended the Gori Church School) tells us:

  Soso’s favorite game was krivi (a sort of collective boxing match between children). There were two teams of boxers: one drawn from those who lived in the upper town, the other representing the lower town. We pummeled each other unmercifully, and weedy little Soso was one of the craftiest scrappers. He had the knack of popping up unexpectedly behind a stronger opponent. But the well-fed children from the lower town were always stronger.

  Peradze—the most powerful boxer in the town—invited Soso to change sides (“our team is the stronger”), but he refused. Of course he did—on the other team he was number one. He never lost his love of “beating.”

  Soso also had the knack of dominating others. He organized an elite group from among the strongest boys. He called them the “Three Musketeers.” Petya Kapanadze, Grisha Glurdzhidze, and Peradze were the three strongest boys and carried out the orders of the pocket d’Artagnan, Soso, without a murmur. After he had become Stalin and annihilated the revolutionary Koba’s comrades-in-arms, he still preserved a sentimental attachment (unusual for him) to little Soso’s friends. In the hungry years of the war he sent all three of them what were, for that time, considerable sums of money. “Please accept a small gift from me. Yours, Soso,” the sixty-eight-year-old writes to the septuagenarian Petya Kapanadze, little Soso’s friend. This and other, similar notes are still to be found in his archives.

  The course at the Gori Church School lasted four years, and throughout his time there Soso was the star pupil. Students were not allowed to leave the building in the evening. A boyhood friend of his recalls that “the people who were sent to check up always found Soso indoors and busy with his lessons.” While his mother was doing other people’s housework he studied diligently. And she was happy: he would be a priest.

  One of the teachers, Dmitri Khakhutashvili, would be remembered by his pupils for the rest of their lives. He introduced the discipline of the rod, in the fullest sense, into the classroom. The boys had to sit stock-still, with their hands on the desk in front of them, and look their fearsome teacher straight in the eye. If one of them showed signs of life and looked away, he would be rapped on his knuckles immediately. “If your eyes wander it means you’re up to something nasty” was the teacher’s favorite saying. Little Soso learned, and never forgot, the power of a steady gaze and the terror felt by a man who does not dare to look away.

  Teachers in the Church School gave their pupils a rough time. There were exceptions: Belyaev, the supervisor, was kind and gentle. But because the pupils were not afraid of him, they did not respect him. That was another lesson for Soso to remember. One day Belyaev took the boys to the City of Caves—those mysterious caverns in the mountains. On the way there they had to cross a wide and turbulent stream. Soso and the other boys jumped over, but tubby Belyaev couldn’t manage it. One of his pupils stepped into the water and “made a back” for the teacher. That was his only hope of crossing the stream. They all heard Soso’s quiet voice saying, “What are you then, a donkey? I wouldn’t make a back for the Lord God himself.” He was morbidly proud, like many people who have been humiliated too often.

  THE DEVIL’S HOOF

  He was also defiantly rude, as children with physical defects often are. As if it wasn’t enough to be small and weedy, his face was pockmarked, the legacy of an illness at the age of six. “Pocky” was his nickname in police reports. But that wasn’t all.

  He was an excellent swimmer but shy about swimming in the Kura. His foot was deformed in some way, and my great-grandfather, who was in the upper classes at school with him, once twitted him with having “the devil’s hoof in his shoe.” It cost him dear. Soso said nothing. But the school strongman, Peradze, used to follow Soso around like a dog on a leash in those days. My great-grandfather had forgotten all about it when Peradze gave him a savage beating. (Letter from K. Dzhivilegov)

  In the President’s Archive, reading the “Medical History of J. V. Stalin,” I turned a page and found this written about our hero: “Webbed toes on left foot.”

  THE MYSTERIOUS ARM

  In innumerable pictures Stalin is portrayed with the fingers of his left hand curled around a pipe. This famous pipe, which became part of his image, was really intended to conceal the deformity of his left hand. He told his second wife, Nadezhda, in 1917 that a phaeton, a horse and cart, had run into him when he was a child and that because there was no money for a doctor his arm had not mended properly. The contusion had turned septic and as a result the arm had become crooked. This coincides with the version, dictated by him, which I found in his “Medical History”: “Atrophy of the shoulder and elbow joints of the left arm. Result of a contusion at the age of six, followed by a prolonged septic condition in the region of the elbow joint.” S. Goglitsidze, Soso’s contemporary, remembers the incident as follows:

  At Epiphany a great crowd of people gathered near the bridge over the Kura. Nobody noticed the phaeton charging downhill out of control … it crashed into the crowd and ran into Soso. The shaft struck his cheek and knocked him off his feet, but fortunately the wheels only passed over the boy’s legs. People crowded round, and Soso was carried home. When she saw her crippled son his mother could not suppress a shriek, but the doctor said that his internal organs were undamaged … and he returned to his studies a few weeks later.

  Another witness also tells us that the phaeton injured a leg. It obviously could not have run over his arm without crushing his “internal organs.” So it must have run over his leg. And he was treated by a doctor and made well again quickly. Not a word here about an injury to his arm. Evidently, the crippled arm did not date from his childhood.

  The story of the deformed arm belongs to a later and darker period in our hero’s life, and to later chapters in this book.

  YET ANOTHER MYSTERY

  But we are forgetting Beso. He came home occasionally and, as before, his wife’s willfulness infuriated him.

  Beso often said to her: “Want your son to become a bishop, do you? You’ll never live to see it. I’m a cobbler, and that’s what he’s going to be.” Afterwards he just carried the boy off to Tiflis and got him a job in the Adelkhanov factory. Soso helped the other workers, did odd jobs for the older hands. But Keke was no longer afraid of her husband. She turned up in Tiflis and carried her son away. (From S. Goglitsidze’s reminiscences)

  She had defeated her husband yet again. And humiliated him. He never returned to Gori after that (perhaps 1888 or 1889). He vanished. Contemporaries of Soso, and his biographers, say that Beso later “died in a dru
nken brawl.”

  What did Soso himself have to say about it?

  In 1909, many years after his father’s death “in a drunken brawl,” Soso was arrested, not for the first time, for revolutionary activity and sent to Vologda. Among the “Reports on Person under Surveillance” which have survived we find the following:

  Case No. 136, Vologda Gendarme Administration. Joseph Vissarionov Dzhugashvili, born in peasant family. Father, Vissarion Ivanov, aged 55, and mother, Ekaterina,… place of residence: mother in Gori, father, no fixed abode.

  Not until 1912 did Soso give a different account for police records: “Father dead, mother living in Gori.”

  How can we explain this? By his passion for confusing the police? Or is there something else?

  Was his father in fact still alive? Remember that Beso’s brother had been killed, all those years ago, in a drunken brawl. Was the story of his death simply transferred to the missing Beso?

  This is a letter I received from N. Korkiya, of Tver.

  In 1931 I met an old man in Sukhumi. He was standing by a meat pie shop on the seafront, begging. I didn’t give him anything, he was very drunk. Suddenly he yelled at me—“D’you know who you’ve just refused money to?”—with a lot of obscene language to follow. The place I was staying at was a few steps away from the pie shop, and my landlady saw the whole scene through the window. When I got in she said in a whisper: “When he’s really drunk he says he fathered Joseph Vissarionovich. Yells at the top of his voice, ‘I made him, with this—— of mine!’ The lunatic will shout himself into his grave one of these days.” When I got back the following year, the old man wasn’t there, of course. He used to live in a cellar next door to the pie shop, and people had seen him picked up and driven away in the night.

  This, of course, is just one legend among others. But one thing is clear his father vanished.

  Life in Gori is drab and monotonous. Nothing that ever happened there made a greater impression than the public execution of two criminals It was February 13, 1892. A thousand people crowded round the foot of the scaffold. The Church School pupils formed a separate group in the crowd. The idea was that “the spectacle of an execution should instill a feeling of the inevitability of retribution, a dread of transgression,” Peter Kapanadze wrote in his memoirs. “We were terribly depressed by the execution. The commandment ‘thou shalt not kill’ did not square with the execution of two peasants. During the execution the rope broke, but the men were hanged a second time.”

  Among the crowd at the scaffold were two future acquaintances Gorky and Soso. Gorky described the execution, Soso stored it up in his memory. He had learned that commandments can be broken. Was that when it first occurred to him that the Church School might be deceiving its pupils?

  Once he began to suspect it, he could never stop.

  Soso left school in 1894 with top marks and entered the first form of the Tiflis Seminary.

  Tiflis at the end of the century: a beautiful, merry, drunken, sun washed city. A world that little Soso saw for the first time. Pick up the Photographic Catalog of Caucasian scenes and types, published at the beginning of the century, and you will see the milling throng: the dignified Georgian in his cherkesska, the chattering artisans in workshops along the narrow streets, the raucous sellers of Georgian bread, the street musicians with their ancient Eastern instrument the zurnach, the brazen hucksters, never quite sober.

  The students lived in the seminary building, on full board, walled in from that southern city brimful of temptations. A bleak asceticism brooded over the seminary, preparing its pupils for a life in the Lord’s service. In the early morning when they longed to lie in, they had to rise for prayers. Then, a hurried light breakfast followed by long hours in the classroom, more prayers, a meager dinner, a brief walk around the city, and it was time for the seminary gates to close. By ten in the evening, when the Southern city was just coming to life, the seminarists had said their prayers and were on their way to bed. This was how Soso’s adolescence progressed. Soso’s fellow student I. Iremashvili wrote in his memoirs, “We felt like prisoners, forced to spend our young lives in this place although innocent.”

  Many of those hot-blooded, early-ripening Southern youths were not at all ready for this life of service. They longed for a different sort of education, one that would allow them to enjoy life’s pleasures while satisfying the thirst for sacrifice, for some higher purpose, which the reading of the holy books and the noble dreams of youth had implanted in them.

  And they found such a creed. The older boys spoke of certain illicit organizations, whose proclaimed purpose was that of the first Christians—service, martyrdom even, for the good of all mankind.

  A LITTLE REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY: “A LAND OF SLAVES”

  The Russian Empire was a land of peasants, with an age-old tradition of serfdom. The “serf right” was abolished only in the second half of the nineteenth century—in 1861. Until then, the great majority of peasants were the property of their masters, the landowners. From time to time the empire was shaken by bloody peasant revolts, but these were just as bloodily repressed, and arbitrary rule and meek submission again prevailed throughout that immense country: “A nation of slaves. All slaves, from the lowest to the highest,” in the words of one of the initiators of the revolutionary movement in Russia, Nikolai Chernyshevsky. The antiquated form of land tenure that prevailed in the countryside partly explained the slavish submissiveness of the peasants. This was the peasant commune (obshchina), an institution abolished long ago in Western Europe. The individual peasant had no right to own land; instead, land was held in common by all members of the commune. The commune made all its decisions collectively. Any rebellious individual dissolved in this meek, downtrodden mass. That was why Russian tsars cherished the commune. It was valued not only by them but also by the first revolutionaries. Whereas the tsar saw in it a way of preserving the great past, what the first Russian radicals, Alexander Herzen and Chernyshevsky, saw in it was the great future. Collective property and collective decision making—these were the socialist instincts which would enable Russia to bypass heartless capitalism and enter socialism directly. All that was required was the revolutionizing of the illiterate muzhik. For this, agitators—latter-day apostles—were needed. “Summon Russia to the Axe,” urged Chernyshevsky, author of the famous novel What Is to Be Done?, the Russian revolutionaries’ Revelation.

  This was the origin of “populism,” the creed of those who put their faith in the common people, in the subconscious socialism of the downtrodden Russian peasant.

  Both the tsar and the revolutionaries were right. But for the “commune” mentality neither the three centuries of the Romanov monarchy nor the subsequent victory of the Bolsheviks in Russia would have been possible. Yet their first encounters with the people, as they really were, were not happy experiences for the revolutionaries. In 1874 hundreds of young people (most from well-to-do families) adopted false names, acquired forged passports, and set out to incite the Russian peasant to revolt. But this “going to the people” merely alarmed the peasants. Most of the luckless apostles were seized by the police or by the peasants themselves.

  Meanwhile the development of revolutionary ideas went on apace among the intelligentsia. One of the dominant influences on the Russian Populist movement was the publicist Peter Tkachev. He joined the revolutionary movement at the age of seventeen as a student and was arrested and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress. He later succeeded in escaping abroad and became the acknowledged leader of the Russian Jacobins. He published abroad an antigovernment journal called Nabat (The Tocsin). He never returned to Russia, but died abroad in a home for the insane at the age of forty-one.

  Tkachev’s original contribution to Russian revolutionary thought was the idea that a popular uprising is not necessary for the success of a revolution. Revolution can be successfully carried out by a narrow conspiratorial group of revolutionary leaders. They must seize power first and then transform a country a
ccustomed to slavish submission. They would speed the Russian people, full steam ahead, along the route to socialism into the bright future. But the expectation was that for the sake of that bright future the majority of the population must be exterminated. Otherwise, because of its backwardness, it would only hinder entry into the socialist paradise.

  PRECEPTS OF THE LATTER-DAY APOSTLES

  One of the pillars of revolutionary socialism was Mikhail Bakunin, the father of Russian anarchism. Bakunin’s ideas provided the basis for the Revolutionary’s Catechism, written by Sergei Nechaev, the founder of a secret society which styled itself “People’s Vengeance.” The Catechism prescribed that the revolutionary should break with the laws of the civilized world: “Our task is terrible, universal destruction.” He must be merciless, expect no mercy for himself, and be ready to die. To carry out his work of destroying the system, he must infiltrate all social formations … including the police. He must exploit rich and influential people, subordinating them to himself. He must aggravate the miseries of the common people, so as to exhaust their patience and incite them to rebel. And, finally, he must ally himself with criminals, “unite with the savage world of the violent criminal, the only true revolutionary in Russia.… Every fully initiated revolutionary must control several revolutionaries of the second or third category (not fully initiated), whom he must look upon as part of the common capital, placed completely at his disposal.” Many Russian revolutionaries, forbidden to live in St. Petersburg, chose to reside in blissful Tiflis. Clever boys from the seminary often came into contact with them. Soso was one of those who met them and was given a copy of the Catechism.