Young Stalin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  “Soso was very naughty,” his younger friend Giorgi Elisabedashvili recalls, “always running through the streets. He loved his catapult and homemade bow. Once a herdsman was bringing his herd home, when Soso jumped out and catapulted a cow in the head. The ox went crazy, the herd stampeded and the herdsman chased Soso who disappeared,” already elusive.* “He used to slip through my hands like a fish,” wrote another school friend, “and it was no use trying to catch him.” Soso once terrorized a shopkeeper by igniting some explosive cartridges that destroyed his shop. “His mother had to hear a lot of cursing about her son.”

  Soso loved to lead his band on the steep climb up to Gorijvari—the mountain on which the “castle of high yellow walls” stood—where they sang, fought, debated religion and admired the views: “He loved the beauties of nature.” Six miles away, there was Uplis-Tsikhe, the “city of caves,” such a hard climb that initially Stalin failed to reach the top. He practised tirelessly, says Iremashvili, until he could make it.

  He was ruthless to other children, but protective of his vassals. When he learned to swim (though he never swam well due to his arm), he pushed a small child who could not swim into the fast Kura waters. The boy protested that he had almost drowned. “Yes, but when you got into trouble, you had to learn to swim,” answered Soso. Yet when his pals were attacked by another gang, Soso “bombarded them with stones until they withdrew.” A friend was being soundly thrashed when Soso appeared and shouted, “Hey, why are you standing there like a donkey? Use your fists!” He beat off the enemy.

  Stalin constantly defied lads “older and stronger than himself,” says young Josef Davrichewy. He was already chippy. He was too clumsy to master the Georgian lekuri dance, so he promptly deadlegged the boy who danced it most gracefully.

  He displayed the will to power that remained with him until his last days. “Soso belonged to his local gang but he often crossed to the opposing band because he refused to obey his own gangleader,” who grumbled that the boy Stalin “undermined my authority and tried to dethrone me.” Iremashvili thought that “all people who, through greater age or strength, dominated others seemed like his father: he developed a vengeful feeling against everyone positioned above himself.” As soon as he was out of his mother’s control, Stalin, even as a child, had to be the leader.

  Somehow, the alternate bullying and crack-up of his father, the passionate adoration of his mother and his own natural intelligence and hauteur, created such a strong conviction that he was always right and must be obeyed that his infectious confidence won him followers. One follower was the son of one of his mother’s Armenian friends—Simon “Senko” Ter-Petrossian, later Kamo. The wealthy father, who had made a fortune supplying the army during Alexander II’s conquests of the Khiva and Bokhara Khanates, angrily asked his daughter “what on earth we saw in that penniless good-for-nothing Stalin. Aren’t there any decent people in Gori?” Not many, it seems.

  Soso “could be a good friend as long as one bowed to his dictatorial will,” opines Iremashvili. When a boy sneaked on Kote Charkviani for eating communion bread, Stalin, in a puerile reenactment of his future purges, “cursed his life, called him an informer, a spy, made him hated by the other boys, then he even beat him black and blue. Soso was a devoted friend.”

  Stalin showed poetical enthusiasm for the mountains and skies but rarely compassion for people. The police officer’s son remembers him at this time as the “very image of his mother.” He was deeply calm and cautious but “when anger took over, he became brutal, swore and pushed things to extremes.” With less to lose than others, with sparser emotional attachments, Stalin became a natural extremist.6

  The streetfighting was legitimate not just because Goreli parents joined in the annual brawls and bet on the wrestling-bouts but because the boys were playing the Georgian bandit-heroes who fought the Russians in the nearby mountains. But now the schoolboys found themselves persecuted by the Russian Empire even at school.

  The bovine Emperor Alexander III orchestrated a conservative backlash against the soft, liberal policies of his murdered father that would unite most Georgians against his Empire. The Tsar decreed that Georgians had to learn and study in Russian*—hence Stalin’s Russian lessons with the Charkvianis.

  When he enrolled at the school in September 1890, Stalin shared the hatred of the new Russian rules. The boys were not even allowed to speak Georgian to each other. Unable to speak Russian very well, “our mouths had been locked in this prison for children,” says Iremashvili. “We loved our native country and mother tongue . . . They considered us Georgians to be an inferior culture into whom the blessing of Russian civilization had to be beaten.” Speaking Georgian in class was punished by “having to stand in a corner or holding a long piece of wood for a whole morning or being locked in a detention cell without food or water and in complete darkness until late evening.”

  The Russian teachers* were brutal pedants in Russian uniforms—tunics with gold buttons and peaked caps—who disdained the Georgian language. But one teacher was beloved—the singing master Simon Gogchilidze, a kindly dandy who always wore the latest fashions: spats, winged collars and a buttonhole. The schoolgirls were in love with him and even wrote songs about him. His favourite choirboy was Stalin, whom he tried to help in every way: “In two years, he learned music and began to help the conductor. There were a lot of solos and Soso always sang them . . .” It was not just his “beautiful, sweet high voice,” writes the romantic teacher, but his “grand style of performance.” Stalin was often hired to sing at weddings: “People would turn up just to watch him sing, saying, ‘Let’s go see how the Djugashvili boy amazes everyone with that voice.’” When Stalin “appeared for the solo in the pulpit wearing his surplice and sang in his wondrous alto, it delighted everyone!”

  During these first school years, Stalin was so devout that he barely missed a mass. “He not only performed the rites but always reminded us of their significance,” says a schoolfellow, A. Chelidze. Another, Suliashvili, remembers Stalin and two other boys in church, “wearing their surplices, kneeling, faces raised, singing Vespers with angelic voices while the other boys prostrated themselves filled with an ecstasy not of this world.” He was the “best reader of Psalms” in church. Others were only permitted to read after being tutored by Soso himself. The grateful school presented him with David’s Book of Psalms inscribed “To Josef Djugashvili . . . for excellent progress, behaviour and excellent recitation and singing of the Psalter.”

  Soso also painted well and showed a taste for acting that would remain with him. He appeared in a satirical vaudeville that mocked Shakespeare: “Soso’s expression made the audience burst into laughter!” He was already starting to write poetry: “He wrote verses instead of letters to his friends.”*

  He was also the school’s most outstanding pupil in class. “He was a very clever boy,” said the singing teacher. “Nobody remembers him scoring anything less than 5s [A grades].” Soso “spent his spare time reading books.” He “often carried volumes stuck into the belt of his trousers” and liked to help less intelligent children with their work. “He never missed a class or arrived late and aimed always to be first in everything,” says his classmate Petre Aadamshvili—whom he advised: “Improve yourself. Don’t be lazy or you’ll lose in life.”

  Even the Georgia-phobe teachers were impressed with Stalin’s knowledge. School Inspector Butyrsky used to excuse himself from social events saying he had to go home to study because “if I’m not prepared [for tomorrow’s class], there’s a pupil named Djugashvili who’s sure to catch me out!”† Stalin was such a goody-goody that when he was on class duty he marked down anyone who was late or tried to cheat. The other boys even nicknamed him “the Gendarme.”

  Yet the class pet was never deferential. When the school went on an expedition and one of the boys let Inspector Butyrsky ride over a stream on his back, Stalin sneered: “What are you, a donkey? I’d never let God himself ride on my back, let alone some sch
ool inspector.” When the beloved Gogchilidze tried to persuade him to perform a song he did not like, Soso did not turn up on the day.

  Lavrov, the most hated teacher and a persecutor of all things Georgian, appointed Stalin his “assistant,” a decision he soon regretted. When Lavrov tried to force his “assistant” to inform on anyone speaking Georgian, Stalin acted. Backed up by some tough eighteen-year-olds, he lured the teacher into an empty classroom and threatened to kill him. Lavrov became much more compliant.

  At the end of the fourth year, Stalin decided that his choir should pose for a portrait. The singing master heard him “dividing the tasks—one boy was to gather money, another to book the photographer and when we gathered [Stalin] arrived with a bunch of flowers, ordering the boys to put them in their buttonholes and arranging them for the photograph.”

  Yet there was always a shadow over Soso: Crazy Beso arrived drunk and seized him from the church school, demanding he become a cobbler. Keke appealed to her protectors: “I raised the entire world, my brothers, godfather Egnatashvili, the teacher. . .” and Beso “returned my son to me.” But Beso repeatedly “burst into the school drunkenly to grab Soso by force.” Henceforth, Soso had to be smuggled into school literally under the coat of Keke’s brothers while “everyone helped and hid the child, telling the infuriated Beso that Soso wasn’t even at the school.”

  The schoolboy Stalin, like the politician he became, was a bundle of contradictions: “Soso Djugashvili,” Iremashvili sums up, “was the best but also the naughtiest pupil.” Stalin’s childhood had already been a triumph over misfortune. But just as he was prospering at school, he again faced a series of terrible blows that almost destroyed him.7

  * Hence it was surrounded by the estates of semi-royals like the Princes Bagration-Mukhransky and grandees such as Prince Amilakhvari. The Georgian nobility was enormous—6 percent of the population—but impoverished and therefore much less isolated than in Russia proper. The viceroy of the Caucasus, Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaievich, brother of Alexander II, built his Gothic Likani Palace nearby at Borzhomi, where these Romanovs summered until the Revolution. When Stalin rose to power, he showed little interest in returning to Gori, but spent the first holiday after the Civil War with his young pregnant wife, Nadya Alliluyeva, at the Likani Palace. It is significant too that, as his health deteriorated, he took his last Georgian holiday in 1951 at Likani. It was and is a beautiful sanctuary, but it must also have symbolized the success of a local boy made good. It is now the summer residence of the Georgian President.

  * Even the old Stalin prided himself as a macho wrestler: when he met Marshal Tito after the Second World War, the handsome Yugoslav somehow made Stalin feel older and weaker. He suddenly lifted Tito off the ground, boasting, “There’s still strength in me.” The Yugoslavs were appalled and bewildered, but here was his last display of Gori wrestling.

  * These stories by Giorgi Elisabedashvili and his cousin Sandro of the vicious little urchin abusing and almost ruining the livelihood of an industrious workingman or streetfighting are found in the archives, but naturally they never appeared in Stalin’s biographies and remain unpublished.

  * This foolish decree not only started Stalin on the road to rebellion but also ensured that his Russian, despite the strong Georgian accent which he never lost, was of a high enough standard that he could plausibly rule the Russian Imperium.

  * School Inspector Butyrsky was typical—a dwarfish, rotund martinet with red moustaches. When he heard Georgian spoken, he shouted: “Don’t speak that language!”

  * As a politician, Stalin was the consummate actor. Those magnates who knew him well in power felt he was often acting: Khrushchev called him a “man of faces;” Kaganovich remarked that there were four or five different versions of Stalin; Mikoyan and Molotov both sensed at various times that Stalin was just playacting. As for the drawing, the only relic of this was his habit of sketching wolves during long meetings.

  † All his life Stalin demanded that his subordinates be as prepared as he was: his deputy in the 1930s, Lazar Kaganovich, said he would prepare for meetings with Stalin like a schoolboy. In the archives there is a handwritten note from Stalin to his comrade Sergo Ordzhonikidze from the 1930s when they were the two most powerful Soviet leaders: “Sergo, tomorrow meeting on bank reform. Are you prepared? Necessary to be prepared.” During the Second World War, he tore to shreds anyone who was not fully prepared.

  4

  A Hanging in Gori

  On 6 January 1890, the choirboys, shepherded by singing teacher Gogchilidze, were trooping out of church after the Epiphany Day blessing for Gori’s Russian garrison. “No one noticed a runaway phaeton,” recalled Gogchilidze, which galloped straight into the crowd. Stalin, now twelve, was just crossing the road when the carriage “hurtled towards him, a pole hit his cheek, knocking him off his feet, [the wheels] running over his legs. The crowd stood round him and picked up the child who had lost consciousness and we carried him away.” The coachman was arrested and later sentenced to a month in jail, but poor Keke again had her bloodied child borne home. When he came round, he saw his desperate mother. “Don’t worry, Mummy, I’m all right,” he said pluckily. “I’m not going to die.”1

  The injuries were so grave that Soso was taken to hospital in Tiflis, the capital, missing school for months. His legs were seriously damaged. Years later at the seminary, he complained of “sore legs” and, even when he recovered, he walked in the heavy, sideways gait that won him another nickname. Already the Pockmarked (Chopura), he became the Loper (Geza). More than ever, he must have yearned to prove his strength yet also enjoyed the confidence of overcoming such adversity.

  The accident brought Beso out of the shadows with a vengeance—the cobbler probably visited the boy in Tiflis. Keke had to let him know that the child was so ill. But Beso could not resist an opportunity to reimpose himself on his defiant family. As soon as Soso had recovered in Tiflis, his father kidnapped the boy and enrolled him as an apprentice cobbler at the Adelkhanov Shoe Factory, where he himself worked.

  “You want my son to be a bishop? Over my dead body, he’ll be educated!” he shouted at Keke. “I’m a shoemaker and my son will be one too.”

  Beso and his son now toiled with the eighty-strong Adelkhanov workforce for long hours and low wages in a half-flooded cellar lit by kerosene lamps amid the almost faecal reek of tanning leather. The stink made grown men vomit. Even the Tsarist authorities were worried about the number of child workers in Adelkhanov’s grim rectangular factory. Living with his father in a room in the Avlabar workers’ district and walking into work over the bridge past the Metekhi Fortress-Prison, Soso had to carry shoes from the factory to the shop-warehouse in the bazaar off Yerevan Square. Apart from the short spell in his father’s Gori workshop, this was to be Stalin’s only experience of a worker’s existence during a life devoted to the proletariat. If Beso had succeeded, there would have been no Stalin, for he would have remained uneducated. Stalin owed his political success to his unusual combination of street brutality and classical education.

  “The whole school missed Soso,” recalled the singing master, “no one more than Keke.” Once again, Keke flew into action, mobilizing all her allies. That formidable and good-looking woman arrived in Tiflis backed by the teachers at the school, Father Charkviani and Egnatashvili, who all tried to prevail over Beso. Even the Exarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church heard of the case and offered to find Soso a place as a chorister in Tiflis, but Keke was determined. Beso raged. The boy was consulted. He wanted to study at the church school in Gori. The priests returned him to Keke. Beso swore never to give another kopeck to his family, cutting them out of his life.

  “Time passed,” says Keke. “Beso’s voice was heard no more. Nobody told me if he was dead or alive. I was even happy that, without him, I alone put the family on a firm footing again.” But Beso would rear up again in Stalin’s life—before disappearing forever.2

  Stalin returned to the school where he aga
in excelled as “the best pupil” (his mother’s proud words). Without Beso’s help, Keke could not pay the school bills. She worked herself ever harder, canvassing her patrons and finding new ones: she started to clean and launder for the decent chairman of the school board, Vasily Beliaev, with a wage of ten roubles a month. Egnatashvili and Davrichewy contributed more. The school itself, mobilized no doubt by Chairman Beliaev, Keke’s protectors and the devoted singing master, not only reinstated Soso but offered a scholarship of three roubles, thirty kopecks too.

  Perhaps the trauma of the accident, the kidnapping and the harsh existence at the factory drained Soso. Just after Beso released him, the boy fell seriously ill with pneumonia. His mother “almost lost him but again Soso escaped death,” reports his singing master. This time, the school doubled the scholarship to seven roubles. Even when he was ill and feverish, his proud Keke reported that he raved, “Mother, let me go to school or teacher Iluridze will give me bad marks . . .”

  For over a year, it had been one crisis after another. Now Stalin celebrated his return to school by taking to his studies with renewed enthusiasm. Yet he was becoming ever more rebellious. “He was punished almost on a daily basis,” says Iremashvili, who sang with him in the choir trio. Soso arranged a protest against the hated inspector Butyrsky that almost led to a riot: “This was the first rebellion instigated by Soso.”

  His mother had to move into miserable rooms on Sobornaya Street, an “old, small and dirty house” with a roof that let in the wind and rain. “The room,” recalls Iremashvili, “was in eternal twilight. The musty air, thick with the smell of rain, wet clothes and cooking, could not escape from it”—but Stalin could. He had even more reason to stay out with his gang in the streets and up Gorijvari Mountain.