Stalin and His Hangmen (5 page)

If Stalin avoided speaking of his father, he was conventionally, if casually, fond of his mother. He sent her short letters and sporadic gifts of money. In the 1930s Katerine could be seen, an austere widow in black, carrying her basket to Tbilisi’s collective-farm market accompanied by a squad of smart NKVD guards – at the fawning initiative of Lavrenti Beria, not at her son’s behest. Stalin visited his mother twice in the 1920s and once in 1935. He just sent a wreath to her funeral.

All who came across Stalin in power were struck by his self-sufficiency and solitude. Perhaps Stalin’s solitary habits came from being the only son of an impoverished and lonely woman, but was his childhood the solitary hell that would produce a psychopath? What we can glean of Isobel’s childhood does not bear this out. The Jughashvilis lived on amicable terms with their neighbours, who were cosmopolitan, upwardly mobile artisans. Nearby lived Katerine’s extended family – craftsmen and innkeepers, with connections to merchants and even aristocrats. Like Beso’s first two short-lived sons (Mikhail 1875, Giorgi 1876) Ioseb Jughashvili had prominent godfathers on whom the family could also count for support. The young Stalin had for company a foster-brother (apprenticed to Besarion) a year younger than himself, Vano Khutsishvili. Vano had no complaints when in 193 9 he recalled their apparently happy childhood in a letter to Stalin.
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Even after Besarion parted from his wife and son, Katerine and Ioseb kept up contact with that side of the family. Besarion’s sister was married to a Iakob Gveseliani, and although they lived near Tbilisi their offspring, Ioseb’s cousins, often visited Gori. As for Katerine, she and her children were part of an extended family in Gori, including her cousin Mariam Mamulashvili, who had seven children. Not until his twenties could Stalin have known involuntary solitude.

Stalin’s cousins – particularly Pepo (Euphemia) Gveseliani on his father’s side and Vano Mamulashvili on his mother’s side – kept in touch with him until his death. They sent letters – ingratiating, begging, sometimes affectionate. They came to Moscow and on two occasions threatened to commit suicide if Stalin refused to see them. His cousins were the only family category for whom Stalin never sanctioned arrests (Stalin’s in-laws, the Svanidzes and Alliluevs, suffered the same near-extermination as did other ‘old Bolsheviks’). Admittedly, Stalin did his blood relatives few favours – they endured the same hardships all Georgia’s peasantry and artisans underwent after the revolution – but they were the only human beings with whom Stalin sustained a semblance of normal relations. In his old age he would send them and some schoolmates parcels of cash (his earnings as a Supreme Soviet deputy). In 1951, General Nikolai Vlasik, the commandant at Stalin’s dacha, drew up a list of Stalin’s surviving relatives and schoolmates for a bus trip to a reunion in Georgia. Vlasik would not have dared to do so had Stalin not shown some last flicker of human affection.

The most telling events in Stalin’s childhood are his brushes with death: his years in Georgia were marked by crippling illnesses and ghastly traffic accidents. All his life Stalin was rarely free of physical pain – which must have stimulated his sadism and irritability – and most of his pain, mental as well as physical, was a residue of childhood. He survived all the childhood illnesses – from measles to scarlet fever – that had carried off his infant brothers but in 1884 caught smallpox and was left badly scarred, earning the nickname Chopura (Poxy). Soon afterwards he was run over by a carriage, and the subsequent blood poisoning apparently withered his left shoulder and arm. In early 1890 in another street accident his legs were run over by a carriage and Ioseb acquired another nickname, Geza (Crooked). His injuries left him with a waddling, strutting walk and a decade later he would plead leg injuries to mitigate his prison sentences. Illnesses, psychological and physical, hold one key to Stalin’s pathological personality; the other is his pursuit of information. From a very early age he understood that ruthless aggression was useless unless he was armed with knowledge: he had to know his enemy and everything that his enemy knew. Very early in his life Stalin became an autodidact, and even in his senility he gathered and tried to retain all the information he could.

Not until her child was eight, a street urchin and, by some accounts, a violent brawler, did Katerine succeed in placing him in school. In 1886 the Jughashvilis had moved to the upper storey of a house owned by a priest, Kristopore Charkviani. Keke begged Charkviani to teach Ioseb to read and write Russian so that he could win a place in Gori’s clerical college, where instruction was mostly in Russian. In summer 1888, still only nine, Soso was accepted into the two-year preparatory class of the college; he learnt Russian so quickly that he graduated to the main school in one year.

Gori clerical college formed the young Stalin. Some of its teachers, particularly the Georgians, were radical intellectuals with considerable talents: one, Giorgi Sadzghelashvili, would become catholicos of the newly autocephalic Georgian Church in 1917; another, Zakare Davitashvili, belonged to literary and revolutionary circles. Davitashvili had Keke’s thanks for ‘singling out my son Soso… you helped him grow to love learning and because of you he knows the Russian language well.’ Even before puberty, Stalin combined the conformist’s desire to study with the radical’s instinct to rebel. At Gori he was influenced by
classmates with older brothers, such as the Ketskhovelis, one of whom had been expelled from Tbilisi seminary for radicalism.

Kinship and friendship also linked twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys with their teachers, and thus with Georgia’s radical intelligentsia as well as its merchants and officials. Georgia differed from Russia in that all educated men, regardless of their social origins and political alignments, were united in their resentment of Russian domination. Wealthy middle-aged capitalists would shelter impoverished radical schoolboys simply because they were fellow Georgians and fellow victims of the empire. That they were, to use Maupassant’s simile, like corn merchants protecting rats, apparently never occurred to these patrons of dissidence.

If Ioseb Jughashvili was disliked by his classmates for his surliness, he was favoured by teachers for his willingness to be class monitor, for his absorption in books and homework. Even the most hated teacher (as usual in Georgian schools, the Russian language teacher), Vladimir Lavrov, known as the gendarme, put his trust in Ioseb Jughashvili. Just as well, for when Katerine became a pauper, the school waived the twenty-five-rouble annual fee and gave the boy a scholarship of three, later seven, roubles a month for ‘exemplary’ performance. He came top in every subject and was an outstanding choirboy and reader in the college’s liturgical services.

When in 1894 Jughashvili matriculated from Gori, he had acquired enough patronage to have a choice of further education. Tbilisi had no university, but it had two tertiary institutions: a pedagogical institute, where the Gori college singing teacher was moving and where he offered to take Jughashvili; and a theological seminary where, with help from his former teachers, Ioseb would be equally sure of placement. With examination results of ‘excellent’ in Bible studies, Church Slavonic and Russian, catechism, Greek, Georgian, geography, calligraphy, church singing and Georgian (only in arithmetic did he gain just ‘very good’) Ioseb Jughashvili actually needed little patronage. Whatever his mother wished, and regardless of his own religious beliefs, the turbulent student life of the Tbilisi seminary would have lured any boy with a desire to make an impact on the world to choose a priest’s, rather than a pedagogue’s, path.

The seminary gave by far the best education in Tbilisi. It was a strange institution where obscurantist Orthodox monk-teachers (mostly
Russians appointed by the viceroy of the Caucasus) fought the mainly Georgian liberals among staff and students. Disruption in the seminary was a perennial topic in the Georgian press for the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. In the early 1890s, the heavy hand of Tsar Alexander III’s bureaucracy began to lose its grip. The new generation of students was more radical and the ferment such that one rector, Kersky, was demoted by the government to monkhood, and another, Chudetsky, was murdered by a former student. The writer Iakob Gogebashvili, like many Georgian luminaries a former teacher there, declared that any student, Russian or Georgian, not gripped by egotistical fear would rebel against the seminary authorities.
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In 1893, the year before Jughashvili entered, the students’ protests and demonstrations frightened the seminary’s hierarchs to such a degree that tuition was suspended and troublemakers expelled.

Despite antagonism between Russian staff and Georgian students, there were some Russian teachers whom Stalin and his classmates later recalled with respect, even reluctant affection. Some reactionaries on the staff were men of character: the deputy rector in the mid-1890s, Father Germogen, later became bishop of Tobolsk and a member of the Holy Synod. In 1914 he was dismissed for denouncing Grigori Rasputin and in 1918 he tried to rescue Tsar Nicholas II from captivity.

Although he had no clerical background, Jughashvili impressed the seminary enough to be awarded a half-scholarship. The withdrawn, introverted surliness that repelled his fellow students seemed to his teachers the seriousness of a dedicated scholar. It took time for Jughashvili’s religious conformism to collapse under the influence of the radicals in the seminary. Even in 1939, in the USSR, it was admitted in print: ‘Ioseb in his first years of study was very much a believer, going to all the services, singing in the church choir… he not only observed all religious rites but always reminded us to carry them out.’
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Stalin’s career at the seminary falls into two periods. Until 1896, when he was seventeen, he was an exemplary student. He acquired the rudiments of classical and modern languages and had begun to read widely in secular Russian and European literature as well as in sacred texts. He had a basic knowledge of world history. His reports show him as fifth in his class with top marks for behaviour, Georgian, church singing, mathematics and ‘very good’ for Greek. He rebelled in earnest
in 1897, his third year. The previous year, when a crowd had been trampled to death at the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II in Moscow, Russian public opinion had turned hostile to the new Tsar, his ministers and the imperial establishment. Jughashvili’s conformism was swept away in this tide of radical anger. His faith collapsed; his term reports become deplorable. By 1898 Jughashvili had fallen to twentieth in the class, he had failed scripture and was due to retake his annual examinations.

The reading prescribed at Tbilisi seminary was theological, and the lives of the Church fathers were the perfect preparation for reading the classics of Marxism. Ten years of ecclesiastical reading turned Stalin into that chimerical creature: the diehard atheist with a profound knowledge and love of religious texts and music. In his sixties Stalin sought out others who had had a seminary education – Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky, the opera bass Maksim Mikhailov. To them he remarked, ‘One thing priests teach you is to understand what people think’.

Stalin’s transition to atheism was neither abrupt nor complete. His atheism was a rebellion against God rather than a disavowal of the deity. The transition from Orthodoxy to Marxism, from the discipline of the Church to that of the party, is easy. Stalin went only halfway. Marxists declare man to be naturally good; all evil stems from social injustice. Stalin knew all human beings to be sinners in need of punishment and expiation. He took with him into power the deeply held conviction that the duty of the ruler was not to make his subjects happy but to prepare their souls for the next world.

At the seminary Stalin’s intellectual interests veered towards forbidden authors and topics. He was now boarding in the same house as the young philosopher Seit Devdariani and illicitly subscribing to the Georgian Society for the Spreading of Literacy, which had a cheap lending library. The cluster of acolytes around Seit and Jughashvili still regarded themselves as trainee priests; the aim that bonded them was to broaden their education through reading political and scientific literature. The books, if found, were confiscated by their teachers, and persistent disobedience of the seminary rules led to imprisonment in a cell on a diet of bread and water.

Seit Devdariani was too mild a philosopher for Jughashvili, and in any case was off to Estonia to study at Tartu (Iuriev) university. In 1897 Jughashvili came under the spell of a more charismatic activist, Lado
Ketskhoveli, who had just returned to Tbilisi from Kiev university after being expelled for reading forbidden literature. Ketskhoveli managed an underground printshop and was Stalin’s first contact with the world of revolutionary propaganda. Under Ketskhoveli’s tutelage Jughashvili now read exegeses of Marxism, not of the Bible. By 1898 he was engaged outside the seminary in propaganda work among Tbilisi’s largest proletarian group, the Caucasian railway workers. He earned money by coaching a boy for entry to the seminary. That autumn the seminary considered expelling Jughashvili; he suffered reprimands, searches and detentions but he was more preoccupied with fomenting a strike of railway engineers in December 1898.

On 29 May 1899 the seminary announced: ‘I. V. Jughashvili is expelled from the seminary for failing for unknown reasons to appear for examinations.’ These ‘unknown reasons’ might have been propagating Marxism, not paying seminary fees after his scholarship was withdrawn or, as Katerine (who came to take him home) maintained, incipient TB. There may have been another reason. To judge by a semi-literate letter that Stalin hid in his private archive in April 1938 he had become in 1899 the father of a baby girl. All we know of her, apart from her later disappearance, was that she bore an extraordinary resemblance to Stalin, that she was called Pasha (Praskovia Georgievna Mikhailovskaia), and that Stalin’s mother at some point took care of her.
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