He read the new commandments after lights out with the help of a candle end.
Without Tkachev and the Revolutionary’s Catechism, we shall never understand either our hero or the history of Russia in the twentieth century.
What particularly attracted the seminarists was the idea, at once alarming and thrilling, of revolutionary terror. Fearing the advance of capitalism in Russia and its destructive effect on the commune, that bulwark of socialism in the future, the revolutionaries resolved to hasten the collapse of the system. They would overthrow tsarism by an unremitting campaign of terrorism against the most important official personages—and by assassinating the tsar himself. They did succeed in murdering Tsar Alexander II, but instead of a popular explosion, what followed was the benighted reign of Alexander III. It was during this period that the Marxists hived off from the Populist movement.
THE REVOLUTIONARY MESSIAH
Symbolically, the first leaders were Georgi Plekhanov, son of a Russian landowner, and Pavel Axelrod, a poor Jew. They adopted Marxism, Russian-fashion, as a bible which foretold the future. And, in accordance with the Great Teaching, Marx’s Russian followers sat down to await results as capitalism developed in their country. For, according to Marx capitalism begets its own murderer, the proletariat—while the proletariat inevitably fathers socialist revolution. The long wait ahead was, of course, rather embarrassing. For the dread murderer of capitalism (like capitalism itself) was in the early embryonic stage in Russia. But the Russian Marxists were resolved to lead it forward from early infancy to revolution and, for this purpose, to create a proletarian party.
Marxism quickly conquered the Tiflis Seminary. Many of its alumni would become revolutionaries. The seminarists readily absorbed Marxist teaching. Self-sacrifice in the service of the poor and the oppressed, the protest against an unjust society, the promise of a Kingdom of Righteousness and the enthronement of a new Messiah (the World Proletariat)—all these ideas seemed to coincide with those implanted by their religious upbringing. Only God was superseded. But by way of compensation they could now live in the real world and enjoy its consolations. Also abolished was the injunction—so strange to young ears—to “return good for evil”; instead, these young savages, sons of a warlike people, were granted the right to be ruthless to the enemies of the new Messiah. Little Soso’s question “Why didn’t Jesus draw his saber?” was resolved. Most important of all, their lowly social position was declared unjust, and they acquired the right to change it themselves. Soso now became a regular listener to Marxist debates.
Revolution was slowly ripening. And the poor but proud boy found the revolution’s great promise—“He that was nothing shall be all”—more seductive all the time. Later, he would write, “I joined the revolutionary movement at fifteen.”
THE POET
His character changed—jollity and love of games were no more.
“He became pensive, seemed gloomy and introspective, was never without a book,” wrote one of his contemporaries later. Never without a new book, to be precise. In this phase of his life he was already in possession of the secret.
“There is no God, they are deceiving us,” he told a classmate, and showed the frightened boy Darwin’s book. This was when he learned to hide his thoughts. A secret unbeliever, he answered his teacher’s questions as brilliantly as ever, even when the content and purpose of the lesson were religious. Duplicity became the staple of his existence.
His break with the past and his loneliness found expression—as it so often does with adolescents—in verse. He sent his verses to the newspaper Iveria. This was not just another newspaper. It was edited and published by the king of Georgian poets, Prince Ilya Chavchavadze. Iveria printed Soso’s poems: the usual sentimental, adolescent musings about the moon, about flowers. Altogether the poet Soso had seven poems published in Iveria in 1895–96. The first was a bravura piece, with this felicitous beginning:
Blossom, my native Iveria!
Exult, O land of my birth!
The last of them struck a tragic note:
Where once the strings of his lyre resounded
The mob has set a vial filled with poison
Before the hounded man,
Crying “Drink, accursed one, such is
Thy lot, the reward for thy songs.
We have no need of your truth
And your heavenly strains!”
Yes, he is preparing himself for a martyr’s career. He remembers the words of the Catechism: “The revolutionary is a doomed man.” Legend has it that Chavchavadze himself believed in the poet’s future and cheered him on his way: “This is the road for you to follow, my son.” It is rather more than a legend. One of Soso’s poems was reprinted in 1907 in the Georgian Chrestomathy: A Collection of the Finest Examples of Georgian Poetry.
But by 1907 our poet’s compositions were of quite a different order.
THE PARRICIDE’S GIFT: HIS REVOLUTIONARY NAME
Those verses were his final farewell to little Soso. His new name would shortly be born. As befit a poet, he was under the spell of a literary character, Koba, the hero of his favorite book in his youth, The Parricide, the work of the Georgian author Kazbegi. Koba was a Georgian Robin Hood, fearlessly robbing the rich. Yet again the same old Bakuninist maxim: “Let us unite with the savage world of the violent criminal—the only revolutionary in Russia.”
The title of this favorite work of his is significant. It all fit. He had rebelled against the Father. And just at this time he had killed the Father in himself. The erstwhile brilliant seminarist was now the revolutionary Koba. Koba was to be the revolutionary pseudonym by which he was most often known for many years to come.
HIS FUTURE TEACHER
Another revolutionary was living at this time in Siberian exile. He was only eight years older than Koba but was destined to play an extraordinary role in his life. His name was Vladimir Ulyanov. The twentieth century remembers him by his revolutionary pseudonym: Lenin.
How unlike the two of them were. The son of an actual state counsellor (the civil rank corresponding to the military rank of general in tsarist Russia) and a member of the gentry class by birth, Lenin grew up in an intellectual Russian family. His parents idolized their children. His father devoted his life to education as a district school inspector. In his boyhood Lenin roamed the paths of his grandfather’s country estate.
The son of a drunken cobbler, Koba had got nothing from his father but beatings, and nothing from life but poverty.
And yet … they were also strangely alike.
In his childhood Lenin was rude and arrogant. Like Koba. Lenin was quick-tempered, yet he could be surprisingly patient, secretive, and cold. Like Koba.
Both had poetic natures. The young Lenin walked the avenues of his grandfather’s estate absorbed in Turgenev’s love story A Nest of Gentlefolk. Young Koba wrote sentimental verses. Both were small and both fanatically, almost insanely, determined always to come out on top, even in boyhood games. Both lost their fathers early; both were idolized by their mothers.
Neither of them at first intended to become a revolutionary. Lenin did so after suffering an indescribable shock: the tragic death of his older brother, hanged for his part in a plot to assassinate Alexander III. His mother’s suffering and the sudden change in their social position were enough to make him hate life’s injustice. His executed brother’s favorite reading, Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done?, in Lenin’s own words, “replowed” him.
Just as The Parricide replowed Koba. The crude romantic trash which was Koba’s reading and the famous philosopher-revolutionary’s book had something in common: both were about the elimination of injustice by violence.
And both young men, as they embraced revolution, took the same lesson to heart: the true revolutionary must be merciless, and not be afraid of blood. Both had devoted supporters, and both possessed “charisma”—the mysterious ability to dominate people by exerting a hypnotic influence over them.
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THE END OF SOSO
EXPULSION
He succeeded in making contact with the revolutionary underground. Versifying was at an end forever. During his absences from the seminary he now ran Marxist discussion groups for workers. He joined the Social Democratic organization called Mesame Dasi.
In 1898 his name is one of the most prominent in the seminary’s record of student misdemeanors: “On the reading of forbidden books by J. Dzhugashvili … On the publication of an illegal manuscript journal by J. Dzhugashvili …” And so on. He has taught himself to answer his teachers’ remonstrances with a contemptuous smile. He despises these deceivers, these servants of a nonexistent God.
He no longer studies. He is not prepared to waste time on it. Yet, interestingly, he becomes one of the most important figures in the life of the seminary. The whole establishment divides into friends and enemies of Koba. Even his enemies fear his secretive, vengeful character, his subtle sarcasm, his rough outbursts of anger. And the vengeance of his friends. The strongest boys for some reason slavishly submit to this puny seminarist with the little eyes, which blaze with a menacing yellow light when he is furious.
Friendship between men is highly prized in Georgia. He has many friends. To be more precise, there are those who believe in him, and they count as “friends.” In reality, he is alone now, as he will be in the future. It is just that some young men are made to feel sure of his friendship and are then used in his struggle with those whom he regards as enemies. There was Soso Iremashvili, who would write so much in his memoirs about their friendship; there was the perfervid Misha Davitashvili, at one time his faithful shadow … there were, and would be, so many who believed in his friendship.
His name continued to appear in the conduct register: “Reading forbidden books, answering the inspector rudely … Joseph Dzhugashvili’s room searched” (they were looking for “forbidden books”). He seemed to be challenging the administration to expel him from the seminary. Why didn’t he just leave? Because he still had not lost his fear of his mother. At this period he no longer went home for vacations. He was avoiding a showdown.
In 1899 it finally happened: he was expelled. “Chucked out of the seminary for Marxist propaganda” is his own explanation. But the truth is different. Koba actually preferred to make a much less dangerous exit from the seminary.
I have before me an excerpt from the minutes of a general meeting of the seminary’s governing body: “On the dismissal of Joseph Dzhugashvili from the Seminary for failure to sit an examination.”
As always, he was behaving cautiously.
In the last year of the dying century he had decided where his future lay: he would play a major part in the history of the coming century.
His mother heard the news—he had renounced the service of God. Her sacrifices had been in vain. It was a dreadful blow for pious Keke. She feared that God would abandon Soso, and that the Devil would move in.
At Christmas Koba started work. It was the first, and last, ordinary job in his life. The relevant entry in the records of the Tiflis Main Physical Observatory—“On the engagement of Joseph Dzhugashvili, December 26, 1899”—has survived.
He arrived at the observatory after Christmas, as the century neared its end. A certain A. Dombrovsky, who worked beside him, has described his duties there: “Joseph worked as an observer-calculator. There was no automatic recording apparatus, so all the meteorological data were recorded, round the clock, by human observers. Day and night. The daytime observer worked until 9 P.M., when the man on night duty relieved him.”
On New Year’s Eve Koba was on night duty in an empty observatory. The others had all gone to celebrate the end of a century.
A magical night: the transition from one millennium to another. The twentieth century, of which nothing yet was known, had arrived, and the man destined to determine its course was peering into the depths of the universe.
Work in the observatory was a blind. His little room there was a hiding place for illegal literature, including the leaflets of the Tiflis committee of the recently founded Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDRP).
FOUNDATION OF HIS PARTY
In the dying days of the century, Russian Marxist émigrés passed from words to deeds. Plekhanov and Axelrod insisted on the establishment of a Marxist workers’ party. The new party was founded with the participation of the General Union of Jewish Workers in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia (the Bund), a mass movement uniting more than twenty thousand Jews. These Jewish Social Democrats were Marxists and anti-Zionists—they believed that only socialism would put an end to anti-Semitism.
In 1898, with the active participation of the Bund, a clandestine congress held in Minsk marked the solemn inauguration of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party. The Congress chose a Central Committee and called for the establishment of local committees. The majority of the Central Committee were arrested immediately after the Congress, but local committees multiplied. One of them appeared in Tiflis, with Koba among its members.
THE SPARK
At this time Lenin was a political exile in Siberia. As soon as he had served his sentence, he emigrated. Once abroad, he won over Plekhanov, Axelrod and other Marxist émigrés to his idea of creating an out-of-the-ordinary newspaper. It would have its agents all over Russia. The duty of these agents would be to dig themselves in to the newly founded RSDRP committees and give a militant lead. They would pave the way for a new congress to create a truly militant party. “Give us such an organization of revolutionaries and we will turn Russia upside down,” wrote Lenin. The newspaper was called Iskra (The Spark). Its epigraph—“From the spark a flame will be kindled”—summed up its program. Lenin and his associates were determined to put old Russia to the torch.
They would succeed. Most of Iskra’s agents would see the revolution victorious, only to perish after it in Stalin’s camps.
In 1900 an agent of Lenin’s Iskra, Viktor Kurnatovsky, appeared in Tiflis introducing Lenin’s central ideas to the city. Above all: the party must be organized on the strictest conspiratorial principles. There could be no broad discussion, no freedom of opinion in the party. It was a militant organization, with revolution as its aim and, hence, implicit discipline to orders from the center and rigid discipline. Marxism was the holy of holies to the new party. Any attempt to revise any Marxist tenet must be condemned as the work of enemies of the working class. Koba was quick to appreciate the power of this ironclad Marxism and promptly became a Leninist.
FIRST BLOOD
The strength of these new ideas was tested in action. The Tiflis committee began preparing a workers’ demonstration, which was meant to end bloodily. Koba and Kurnatovsky both had high hopes of this bloodshed. I. Iremashvili, an acquaintance of Koba’s from the seminary, remembered Koba “frequently repeating that a bloody struggle must bring the quickest results.” What Iremashvili did not know was that Koba was only repeating the Leninist slogans which Kurnatovsky had brought with him.
At about this time Koba’s mother visited him at the observatory and stayed for a while. Keke evidently tried to make Soso return to the seminary. She had not yet given up hope. She did not know that her Soso was dead and that Koba had taken over. As yet only his new brothers, the revolutionaries, knew him by that name. But the poor woman soon realized her impotence. God had departed from Soso’s heart, and the man talking to her was a stranger, the terrifying Koba. His mother went home to Gori.
The arrests began a month before the demonstration was due. Kurnatovsky was arrested, but Koba managed to disappear. He handed in a request for release from his employment on the eve of the demonstration. He was discharged from the observatory at the end of March but was allowed to retain for the time being the little room.
1901. On May 1 people in warm overcoats and sheepskin caps appeared in the center of the city. They were workers, steeling themselves for a clash with Cossacks carrying whips. Two thousand demonstrators assembled in the city center. Cries of “Down
with autocracy!” rang out as the police began dispersing the turbulent crowd. And blood began to flow: that of wounded and arrested demonstrators. All this was a novelty in that gay, lighthearted Southern city. “The revolutionary movement can be said to have come out into the open for the first time in the Caucasus,” Iskra noted with satisfaction.
There were arrests and house searches in the city. The little room in the observatory was searched, but Koba himself was long gone. He would often show this impressive ability to vanish at decisive and dangerous moments. “Koba, one of the ringleaders wanted by the police, managed to escape … he ran away to Gori … where he made a clandestine visit to my apartment at dead of night,” remembered I. Iremashvili. The argument with his mother must have continued in Gori. Still, a mother had to help her son hide. And she did. But could she love this Koba, now that the flame of hatred burned in his heart? She who had deified her little Soso and dreamed of seeing him a priest?
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