Young Stalin (16 page)

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On 4 September 1943, the exiled Russian Patriarch Sergei and two Metropolitans were summoned for a bizarre nocturnal Kremlin chat at which Stalin revealed that he had decided to restore the Patriarchate, churches and seminaries. Sergei thought perhaps it was too early for seminaries. Stalin replied, “Seminaries are better,” but mused disingenuously, “Why don’t you have any cadres? Where have they disappeared to?” Instead of replying that his “cadres” had been systematically liquidated by Stalin, Sergei tactfully joked: “One of the reasons is that we train a person for priesthood and he becomes a Marshal of the Soviet Union.” Stalin then reminisced about the seminary until 3 a.m. “Your Grace,” he concluded, wishing the priests good night, “that’s all I can do for you now.”

8

The Weatherman: Parties and Princes

S
oso needed a job and a home. He became a weatherman. Unlikely as it sounds, the life of a meteorologist at the Tiflis Meteorological Observatory was a most convenient cover for a young revolutionary. His friend from Gori, Vano Ketskhoveli, younger brother of Lado, was already working there when in October 1899 Stalin arrived to share his small room beneath the observatory’s tower.
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As a “probationer-observer,” he was on duty only three times a week from 6:30 a.m. until 10 p.m., checking temperatures and barometers hourly, in return for twenty roubles a month. On night duty, he worked from 8:30 p.m. to 8: 30 a.m., but then he had the whole day off for revolutionary work. In late 1899, Lado, eagerly assisted by Soso, started to organize a strike, one of the first full-scale radical mobilizations of workers in Georgia.

On New Year’s Day, Lado managed to paralyse the city when the drivers of its Belgian-owned trams stopped work. The secret police were observing Lado and his revolutionary weathermen. In the first weeks of 1900, the police turned up at the observatory, arrested Stalin and carted
him off to the Metekhi Fortress. The arrest, Stalin’s first of many, was officially because Beso had not paid his local taxes in his native village, Didi-Lilo
¹
—though probably this was a cryptic warning from the Gendarmes.

Stalin had no money, but his better-off friends (led by Davitashvili) banded together and settled the bill. This can hardly have added to Soso’s paternal affections, yet Beso did visit him at the observatory several times.

When Keke heard that Beso had once again descended on her son, the redoubtable mother headed into Tiflis on a rescue mission. She insisted on staying in Soso’s room.
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Once Stalin was released—and the interfering Keke had gone home—he returned to encouraging the workers to strike across the city: the railway workshops were the hub of this agitation. He spent much time around the railway depot, “a long stone building with large latticed windows, the deafening roar of clanks and knocks, the puffing and huffing of locomotives.” Initially, his comrades assigned him two clandestine groups of railway workers—so-called circles—to supervise. “I was a complete greenhorn, a total beginner.”
³

Stalin lived and dressed the part, wearing what Trotsky called the “generally recognized sign of a revolutionary, especially in the provinces”: a beard; long, almost hippyish hair; and a black satin Russian blouse with a red tie. And he revelled in his scruffiness. “You never saw him in anything,” says Iremashvili, “but that dirty blouse and unpolished shoes.”
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Soso energetically lectured and agitated at his circles. “Why are we poor?” he asked these small gatherings in workers’ digs. “Why are we disenfranchised? How can our life be changed?” His answer was Marxism and the Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party (the SDs).
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The workers listened reverently to this young preacher—and it was no coincidence that many revolutionaries were seminarists and the workers, often pious ex-peasants. Some later nicknamed Soso “the Priest.” “It’s a holy struggle,” explained the Tiflis agitator Mikhail Kalinin. Trotsky, agitating in another city, remembered that many of the workers thought the movement resembled “the early Christians” and had to be taught that they should be atheists.

“If the word ‘committee’ has a tedious twang nowadays, then the very words ‘committee’ and ‘party’. . . charmed young ears like a seductive melody,” wrote Trotsky. “These were the days of those aged 18–30. Anyone who joined knew prison and exile awaited him—it was a matter of honour to hold out as long as possible.”

Soso, who also believed in the sanctity of the cause, soon achieved his first success.
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On 1 May 1900, Soso organized a secretive and seminal mass meeting with his characteristically meticulous security. May Day—the Maievka—was the Christmas Day of socialism. The secret police tried to arrest Lado, who scarpered to Baku, the oil city on the Caspian Sea. Stalin stepped into his shoes.

The evening before, instructions and passwords were distributed. At night,500 workers and activists headed into the hills outside Tiflis to be met by lantern-waving picket-leaders who confided new passwords and routes. At the meeting, they sang “The Marseillaise.” Stalin and the other speakers then clambered onto some rocks: there Soso gave his first big speech, vigorously encouraging strike action while Jordania and the Mesame Dasi opposed it.

Soso and his radicals won. The railroad depots struck, as did Adelkhanov’s Shoe Factory, where Beso still worked.

“Why are you coming here?” he asked Soso, resenting his son’s visit.

“To address these fellows,” replied Soso.

“Why aren’t you learning a trade?” It was their last recorded contact: Beso failed to cling to his job and became one of the flotsam and jetsam of vagrant desperadoes, borne away on a tide of alcoholism, poverty and despair.

For the first time, the secret police mentioned Soso Djugashvili—along with the much older Victor Kurnatovsky, who knew Lenin himself, and Silva Jibladze, the legendary rector-beater—as a leader in their reports. Stalin had made his mark.
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The secret police were circling, but life in Tiflis was still sleepy, charming, idyllic with its balmy nights and busy street cafés. The revolutionaries enjoyed an almost undergraduate existence. “Their evenings were filled with loud arguments, reading and prolonged conversations interspersed with guitar playing and singing,” recalls Anna Alliluyeva, daughter of Sergei, the skilled electrician and Marxist agitator who operated alongside Stalin at the Tiflis railway depot. Tiflis was an intimate town where news travelled fast from one vine-entwined verandah to another on “the balcony telegraph.”

Stalin was just beginning, but already he divided his comrades into heroes, followers and enemies. First he found a new mentor, Prince
Alexander “Sasha” Tsulukidze, a “tall handsome young man” dressed beautifully in Western suits, a friend of his other hero, Lado. Both hailed from classes above that of Stalin: Lado was a priest’s son but the Red Prince’s father was one of Georgia’s richest aristocrats; the family of his mother, Princess Olympiada Shervashidze, had ruled Abkhazia.
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Stalin praised the “astonishing, outstanding talents” of Lado and Prince Sasha, both of them beyond his jealousy because they were long dead. Stalin had only one real hero: himself. In a lifetime of defiant, self-reliant egotism, Lado, Prince Sasha and Lenin were the only others who came close. He was, he said, their “disciple.”
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Stalin already had his own little court among the radical boys expelled from the seminary: another forty were sent down in 1901, including the icon-urinator (Stalin’s ex-pupil) Elisabedashvili and his friend Alexander “Alyosha” Svanidze, who rented a flat in Sololaki Street, just above Yerevan Square. There Stalin gave lessons, preparing a reading list of 300 books for his circle. “He didn’t just read books,” said Elisabedashvili, “he
ate
them.” Debonair with noble connections and three pretty sisters, Alyosha Svanidze would become Stalin’s brother-in-law and intimate until the Terror. But Stalin did not meet the sisters for a while.

The other pupil, just arrived from Gori, was the semi-psychotic Simon Ter-Petrossian, aged nineteen, soon to be known as “Kamo,” who had also spent his childhood joining in streetfights, “stealing fruit and my favourite activity—boxing!” He hung around Svanidze’s flat “in order to learn something,” but he wanted to be an army officer. His tyrannical father ranted at him for spending time with Stalin, “that penniless good-for-nothing.” But “when my father went bankrupt in 1901,” says Ter-Petrossian, he lost his power over the boy. “Stalin was my tutor. He taught me literature and gave me books . . . I really liked Zola’s
Germinal
!” Stalin “drew him like a magnet.”

Stalin was not the most patient teacher, however. When Ter-Petrossian struggled with Russian and Marxism, Stalin ordered another
of his acolytes, Vardoyan, to teach him. “Soso lay reading a book while I taught Kamo Russian grammar,” remembers Vardoyan, “but Kamo had limited mental abilities and kept saying
kamo
instead of
komu
[to whom].” Stalin “lost his temper and jumped up but then laughed, ‘
Komu
not
kamo!
Try and remember it,
bicho
[boy]!’ Afterwards, Soso, always an avid coiner of nicknames for his courtiers, nicknamed Ter-Petrossian ‘Kamo,’ which stuck for his whole life,” says Vardoyan. If Kamo struggled with the language, he was intoxicated with Marxism, and “enthralled” by Stalin. “For now, just
read more!”
Stalin instructed him. “You might just manage to become an officer, but it would be better if you gave it up, and engaged in something else . . .” Stalin, like Dr. Frankenstein, groomed Kamo to become his enforcer and cutthroat.

“Soso was a philosophical conspirator from the start. We learned conspiracy from him,” says Vardoyan. “I was addicted to his way of talking and laughing, his mannerisms. I found myself imitating him against my will so my friends called me ‘Soso’s gramophone.’”
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Yet Soso was never the carefree Georgian. Even then, “He was a very unusual and mysterious man,” explains David Sagirashvili, a young socialist who met him at this time and noticed him “walking the streets of Tiflis, thin, pockmarked and carelessly dressed, burdened with a big stack of books.”

Stalin attended a wild party given by Alyosha Svanidze. They were drinking cocktails of melon juice and brandy, and got wildly drunk. Yet Soso lay on a sofa on the verandah reading silently, making notes. So they started to look for him: “Where is he?”

“Soso’s reading,” replied Alyosha Svanidze.

“What are you reading?” his friends asked mockingly.

“Napoleon Bonaparte’s
Memoirs,”
Soso replied. “It’s amazing what mistakes he made. I’m making a note of them!” The intoxicated gentry had hysterics at this autodidactic cobbler’s son whom they now nicknamed the “Kunkula” (Staggerer), for his hasty and awkward gait.
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But the serious revolutionaries, such as Stalin, Lado and Prince Sasha, were not wasting their time on cocktails.

Georgia was in a revolutionary “ferment of ideas.” These passionate young idealists “returned late at night with friends,” recounts Anna Alliluyeva. “They sit down at the table, someone opens a book, starts to read aloud.” They were all reading one thing—Lenin’s new newspaper
Iskra
(Spark), which propagated the vision of a party led by a tiny militant elite.

This new model of a revolutionary electrified young hotheads like Stalin, who no longer aspired to be the gentleman-amateur enthusing broad groups of workers but resolved to be the brutal professional, leader of a ruthless sect. Always happiest in vigorous campaigns against internal as well as external foes, Soso, still only aged twenty-two, was determined to break Jordania and Jibladze, and bend the Tiflis Party to his own will. “He spoke with cruelty,” reports Razhden Arsenidze, a moderate Marxist who admitted that Stalin “radiated energy, his words imbued with a raw power and singlemindedness. Frequently sarcastic, his cruel witticisms were often as extreme as the lash of a whip.” When his “outraged” listeners protested, he “apologized, explaining that it was the language of the proletariat,” who “talked bluntly but always told the truth.”

The secret police and the workers regarded this ex-seminarist as an “intellectual,” but to the bewildered moderates he was “a muddled young comrade” launching a “hostile and disruptive agitation against the leaderships of the SD organization in Tiflis.” They openly mocked Soso as “ignorant and obnoxious,” according to Davrichewy. Jibladze grumbled that “we gave him circles to agitate against the state and instead he agitated against us.”
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