Stalin: A Biography Read online

  I… saw that among the pupils was standing a boy I didn’t know, dressed in a long akhalukhi [a plain, cloth body-garment] which went down to his knees, in new boots with high tops. He had a thick leather belt tightly drawn around his waist. On his head was a black cloth peak-cap with a varnished peak which shone in the sun.

  No one else wore either an akhalukhi or such boots, and the other pupils pressed around him out of curiosity. Obviously his mother was very eager to dress her son as well as possible; she had coddled him since birth. She herself had never been to school, and probably she did not understand that by dressing him up differently, she did him no favours with his fellow pupils.

  Gradually he began to stand up to her. When out of her sight, he pulled off his white collar and mixed with the other boys on the streets.24 He adopted the same routines at school. All first-hand accounts recorded his pugnacity towards rivals. But he was also devout, hard-working and determined to succeed, and the path on which he was stepping offered the chance for him to move out of the poverty he endured at home.

  His intelligence and diligence had been recognised. His peculiarities were noted by acquaintances: he was volatile, sly and resentful. But nobody yet felt that these features existed to an abnormal degree. He had had a rougher upbringing than most other boys in the town and much was forgiven him. It was only in retrospect that the cocktail of permanent harm to his personality became detectable. He was mistreated by his father, and detested him. At the same time his mother handled him as a very special person; much was expected of him. Being an only child, he was spoiled. This can only have increased his resentment at the way his father behaved towards him. The fuss made of him by Keke protected him for a while against the rough games of the local boys. But the will to prove himself had not been cosseted out of him, and his father’s recurrent violence gave him a competing model of the kind of man he wanted to be. Although he desired to become a priest, he also wished to prove his toughness. He had known no fairness from his father; he would show none to those contemporaries who got in his way. He was not the strongest fighter on his streets but compensated by using methods that others avoided. His constant wish was to get on top and stay there: this was one of the few attitudes shared by his father and mother, albeit in their different ways.

  The upbringing of young Dzhughashvili did not predetermine the career of Joseph Stalin. There were too many contradictions in his personality and parental treatment for a single possible result to be predictable. A lot more had to happen before psychological settlement occurred, and this included his particular experiences as well as events in the wider world. Yet without the childhood experienced by Joseph there would have been no Stalin. For the tree to grow there had to be a seed.

  3. THE SCHOOLING OF A PRIEST

  Joseph took time to benefit fully from his educational opportunity. Not having spoken Russian at home, he stayed in the preparatory classes for two years. But he proved a quick learner and already knew enough of the language to leap over the beginners’ class. He started the full course in September 1890.1 Beso Dzhughashvili had never liked the idea of his boy becoming a scholar. At some early stage of Joseph’s course at the Gori Spiritual School,2 there was a terrible row between Beso and Keke. The angry Beso triumphed and took Joseph back to Tbilisi with him to work at the Adelkhanov Shoe Factory. Joseph was to become an apprentice and drop Keke’s plan for him to enter the priesthood.3 Beso was a drunk and a failed artisan; but his attitude was not unusual. He insisted that what was good enough for him in employment was equally appropriate for his offspring.

  The authorities categorised the Adelkhanov Shoe Factory as among the most decent in Georgia towards its eighty workers since, unlike rival factories, it had its own medical facilities. Yet most people thought Emile Adelkhanov, who had opened his enterprise in 1875, a harsh exploiter of his workforce. Wages were low and the conditions were especially harsh for young boys — indeed the same authorities worried about the large number of youngsters employed by Adelkhanov and about the effects on their health and upbringing in the grim, rectangular building.4 Adelkhanov was no philanthropist. When the terms of trade turned against him at the end of the century, he instantly cut wages. The result was a bitterly fought strike.5 For Beso Dzhughashvili, however, Adelkhanov’s cost-cutting recruitment of minors was a definite attraction. The extra money, however small initially, would come in useful: Joseph could start to pay his own way. He would not see much of the centre of Tbilisi with its palaces, cathedrals and grand shops. They lodged in a cheap room in the Avlabari district on the left bank of the River Mtkvari and each day walked down past the Metekhi Prison and over the bridge into the winding, cobbled streets of the Ortachala district where the factory stood. Joseph’s first encounter with capitalism was raw, harsh and dispiriting.

  Yet he cannot have failed to note how different Tbilisi was from Gori. A mixture of cultures existed around the Adelkhanov Shoe Factory. Apart from the rival Mantashëv Shoe Factory there were synagogues for the Tbilisi Jews, several Armenian churches and half a dozen Georgian churches. Near by there were the sulphur baths used by the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin earlier in the century. The entire area, including the gently bubbling stretch of the River Mtkvari, lay across hot springs valued for their medicinal properties. During his time in the factory, Joseph Dzhughashvili was being shown that a wider world of experience existed than he could possibly have imagined as a schoolboy in Gori.

  If Beso had continued to prevail, there would have been no Stalin — and world history would have been different. To rise to the peak of the Russian Communist Party in the 1920s it was to be essential to have a fluent and plausible pen; and much as he resented the priests who taught him, Joseph owed them a lasting debt for his education. He was also beholden to his mother’s refusal to accept defeat. Doting on her departed son, she went to the priests in Gori and got them to help her to constrain Beso to release Joseph from factory work. Beso relented, and after a few months Joseph returned to his desk at the Spiritual School. Unsurprisingly he had not become a proficient cobbler in that brief period. His tasks had been limited to fetching and carrying for the adults in the factory. But he had seen enough of contemporary manufacturing to avoid a repetition of the experience. It proved to be his only opportunity to know industrial work directly, but not once did he refer to it in print. Although he was to write in later years about ‘the working class’ and ‘the factory system’, he was mostly drawing on conversations he had with workers of the sort he never became.

  Beso Dzhughashvili began to fade from the lives of Keke and Joseph. It is not known how many times, if any, he returned to Gori. What is sure is that he never lived there for any lengthy time again. His drinking seems to have taken him over as he moved from job to job. There is a legend that Joseph murdered Beso. Not a scrap of evidence has been found for this and the truth was probably much more prosaic. Beso, having made a mess of his life, coped on his own. He worked in factories, drank in taverns and eventually lost all control of his life. According to some accounts, he died before the turn of the century; but the likelihood is that Beso, alone and destitute, died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1909.6

  In Beso’s absence, Joseph reverted to the exclusive care of his mother. Quite how Joseph dealt with the breakdown in his parents’ marriage and his father’s departure is unclear. But clues survive. When he published poems in 1895–6, ‘Besoshvili’ was among his pseudonyms. This was clearly not an accidental choice. Nor was the reference in one of his early articles to how the capitalist economy put independent craftsmen under huge commercial pressure and forced most of them to give up their workshops and enter factory employment. The conclusion is irresistible. Joseph did not share his father’s ambition for him. He did not like being beaten. He had erupted in fury at Beso’s ill-tempered demands and behaviour. But Joseph was a thoughtful as well as sensitive child. When he started to think as a Marxist, he came to see Beso as a victim of history.7 This would surely not have happened if, at
the back of his mind, Joseph had not retained a feeling of affection and understanding for his father. This may appear paradoxical. Stalin, Beso’s victim, kept fond thoughts of the man who had maltreated him. This is not an unusual reaction. The fact that Beso had passed out of his life probably helped Joseph to sanitise his recollections.

  Back in Gori, Joseph resumed the life of church, school and the streets. It was an eventful period. While standing outside church one day, Joseph was knocked down by a phaeton. This was a horse-drawn trap, typically with two or three seats for its occupants, primitive suspension-hoops and a simple set of shafts. Open to the air, it was one of the cheapest forms of carriage. The driver that day in Gori lost control of his horse. The phaeton careered towards the crowd by the church wall and young Joseph Dzhughashvili did not move out of the way in time. It could have been a fatal accident.8

  Although the boy’s left arm and his legs were badly damaged, he quickly recovered.9 Soon he was attending school again. The physical harm, however, was permanent. Joseph’s arm was left shortened and lacking in flexibility. It was to be the reason why he was not called up into the Imperial Army in 1916–17. Thus an unruly horse, by trampling the Gori youngster, was instrumental in saving him from potential annihilation in the Great War. The accident made him ungainly and apparently embarrassed about his appearance. Another point of psychological stress was added to the list. Nor did the injury enhance his prowess in the trials of strengths among the boys of the town. But he was determined to prove himself. Schoolmate Joseph Iremashvili recalled how young Dzhughashvili continued to use dirty methods to win his wrestling bouts.10 Nothing satisfied him except the leading position. He could not abide his friend David Machavariani heading their street gang. Sometimes he went off and joined another gang rather than accept orders from Machavariani. It was this kind of behaviour that led him to become known for his ‘bad character’.

  When this got him nowhere, he accepted David Machavariani’s leadership. Like everyone else, he had to pass a series of initiation tests in order to join the gang. Would-be members needed to prove their mettle by going for a long run, carrying out an act of theft and submitting to be beaten with a strap. Others in the gang were Peter Kapanadze and Joseph Davrishevi.11 Young Dzhughashvili never forgot these days and was to keep in touch with Peter when they were old men.12 These friends remembered Joseph as rather gawky. He never mastered Georgia’s traditional dances. The lekuri (which was known in Russia as the lezginka) remained beyond his powers. There was competition among the town boys to perform it well. When another fellow did it better, Joseph moved over to his rival and deadlegged him.

  His mother started working as a seamstress at the Davrishevis, and Joseph Dzhughashvili began to see a lot of Joseph Davrishevi. Some days they climbed up to the fortress above the town to see the birds living in the walls. But they did not always get on well. Joseph Dzhughashvili was not averse to stealing his friend’s food. When a dispute broke out, Davrishevi’s father came out and gave them another dish. Dzhughashvili justified his misdemeanour by telling his friend that it had ensured that they should receive double the normal amount.13 Sometimes, though, he pushed his luck too hard. Keen to show how tough he was, he challenged stronger boys to fight. Downed ten times in a tussle with a lad from another gang, he was badly beaten up. His mother fetched him home and complained to police chief Davrishevi, but he replied: ‘When an earthenware pot clashes with an iron pot, it’s the earthenware pot which gets cracked and not the iron one.’14

  Joseph’s misdemeanours were not confined to his fights with other boys. The bright student at school was a scamp on the streets. Among his victims was a mentally deficient woman called Magdalena. His partner in crime was young Davrishevi. Magdalena possessed a Persian cat, and the two lads teased her by tying a pan to its tail. On her name day they crept into her kitchen while she was at church and stole an enormous cake.15 The affair was resolved without undue fuss but Davrishevi, who could hardly claim innocence, concluded that it showed that Joseph Dzhughashvili was a queer and nasty piece of work from the beginning. Another boyhood memoirist, Joseph Iremashvili, came to the same opinion. Both Davrishevi and Iremashvili imputed primary responsibility to their friend. By the same token they asserted that Dzhughashvili had a leading role even if he never achieved his goal of gang leadership. Young Dzhughashvili was cantankerous, volatile and ambitious; he was also frustrated: he never supplanted David Machavariani in the gang. But apparently this was not a situation he accepted. He resented it. He had talent and wanted others to recognise it. He was reluctant to bide his time. Others ought to show him greater respect than he currently received.

  There was also a wider aspect to his character’s formation. He was brought up near the mountains of Georgia where traditions of blood feud persisted, and it has been suggested that his propensity for violence, conspiracy and revenge sprang from this culture. There is an obvious difficulty here. Most Georgians entering educational institutions in the late Imperial period tended to accommodate themselves to a less traditional worldview. If indeed the culture of the mountainside was an influence upon him, Joseph was peculiar in failing to evolve away from it. Not all Georgians were obsessively vengeful. The customary stress on compensation for injury did not have to involve the principle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Negotiations between the perpetrator and the victim of hurt — or their relatives — were another way of dealing with the problem. There was something quite extraordinary about Joseph’s vindictiveness. As he grew up, he was notorious for this characteristic: he enjoyed crushing his rivals — it was never enough simply to defeat them. Georgian popular culture had a broad emphasis on honour. This involved loyalty to family, friends and clients. Joseph by contrast felt no lasting obligation to anybody. He was later to execute in-laws, veteran fellow leaders and whole groups of communists whose patron he had been. On the surface he was a good Georgian. He never ceased to revere the poetry he loved as a youth. He hosted lavish dinner parties after the Caucasian manner once he was in power. He liked to carouse; he dandled children on his knee. But his sense of traditional honour was non-existent. If he retained a number of attitudes and customs from his childhood, there were many which he abandoned. The history of the twentieth century would have been a lot less bloody if Joseph Dzhughashvili had been a better Georgian.

  Not only popular culture but also Georgian literature had an influence on him. He loved the national classics, especially the thirteenth-century epic poetry of Shota Rustaveli (who was revered by Georgians as their Dante).16 Another favourite was Alexander Qazbegi’s story The Patricide, which had been published to much acclaim in 1883: Joseph loved it. The main character was called Koba. The plot involved episodes from the history of the great resistance led by Shamil against Russian Imperial power in the 1840s. Koba was an abrek. The term implies not just a robber but a man of the mountains with fearless hostility to all authority. Abreks live by their cunning as well as violence but do not prey upon ordinary people. Their code of honour allows and encourages them to be ruthless. What they punish is treachery. They do not expect life to be easy or God to rescue them from misfortune; and The Patricide suggested that betrayal by friends and acquaintances is something only to be expected. But revenge is sweet; the abreks will always pursue to the death those who have wronged them. Koba declares: ‘I’ll make their mothers weep!’

  The abreks caused greater damage to civil society than Qazbegi allowed. As a Georgian urban story-teller he strove to suggest that the old ways of the Caucasus had a certain nobility. Russian writers such as Pushkin, Lermontov and Tolstoi also put Caucasian robbers into their works but seldom — until Tolstoi’s Hadji Murat in 1912 — gave a convincing interior view of the mind of mountain outlaws. Qazbegi was not in their class as a literary figure, but his immediate popularity with Georgian readers was enormous. His treatment of the Shamil resistance ignored reference to its Islamist purpose. He provided Georgians with a sense of national worth. Qazbegi was offering an admir
ing portrait of the violent traditions of the mountains: blood feud, vengeance, personal honour and life beyond the law. This was a romantic view more extreme in its particular aspects than anything offered in Walter Scott, Lord Byron or Alexander Pushkin. Qazbegi implied that the dominant values in cities and towns in Georgia — Christianity, commerce, education, law and administration — were inferior to the savage beliefs and customs of the mountains.

  Gori lies in a valley and its inhabitants were not the rough mountaineers who lived by thievery, kidnapping and murder. One of his school friends, however, recalled how impressed Joseph was by Qazbegi’s work:17

  Koba was Soso’s ideal and the image of his dreams. Koba became Soso’s God, the meaning of his life. He wanted to be the second Koba, a fighter and hero — like him — covered with glory… From then onwards he called himself Koba, he absolutely didn’t want us to call him by any other name.

  Works of literature allow for diverse interpretations. Qazbegi’s story is unusually straightforward, and Stalin’s subsequent preoccupation with revenge and personal honour indicate that the basic message was successfully transmitted.

  It is in this connection that one of the most gruesome events of Joseph’s childhood should be interpreted. While he was a schoolboy, two ‘bandits’ were hanged on the gibbet in the centre of Gori.18 The event left a deep imprint on the boy’s mind, and many years later — when biographical details about him were published — he allowed an account of the hanging to be reproduced. His biographers have frequently adduced his remembrance of the events as evidence of his psychological peculiarity. That Joseph developed a gross personality disorder can hardly be denied. But he was not alone in witnessing or remembering the hanging. It was the most remarkable event in Gori of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. What happened was as follows. Two men of the mountains were being pursued by a policeman on horseback who tried to take possession of their cow. They resisted. In the ensuing altercation they shot him. Strife between brigands and the police was not unknown in Gori and the surrounding area. Shoot-outs occurred not infrequently. Urban inhabitants more often than not took the side opposed to the police. Hatred of the authorities was widespread. Defence of family, property and native village was thought justifiable regardless of Imperial legislation. So when the captured brigands were sentenced to death, the popular interest — and not just Joseph’s — was intense.19