Young Stalin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

On his return to the seminary in 1897, Stalin broke with Devdariani. “Major and not altogether harmless feuds . . . were usually stirred up by Koba,” says Iremashvili, who remained with Devdariani. “Koba thought it natural to be the leader and never tolerated any criticism. Two parties formed—one for Koba, and one against.” It was a pattern to be repeated throughout his life. He found a tougher mentor, meeting up again with the inspiring Lado Ketskhoveli from Gori, who had been expelled from both the Tiflis and Kiev Seminaries, arrested and now released. Soso respected no one like Lado.

  His mentor introduced his younger friend to the fiery black-eyed Silibistro “Silva” Jibladze, the legendary seminarist who had beaten up the rector. Jibladze and an elegant nobleman named Noe Jordania had, with some others, founded a Georgian socialist party, the Third Group (Mesame Dasi), in 1892. Now these Marxists reassembled in Tiflis, taking over the Kvali newspaper and starting to sow revolution among the workers. Jibladze took the teenager to the apartment of Vano Sturua, who recalls that “Jibladze brought an unknown youngster.”

  Eager to contribute, Stalin called on the group’s forceful leader, Noe Jordania, just returned from exile, at Kvali, which had published his last poem. Jordania, tall, with “a graceful and handsome face, black beard . . . and aristocratic habits and demeanour,” patronizingly suggested that Soso should study more. “I’ll think it over,” replied the truculent youth. Now he had an enemy to fight. He wrote a letter criticizing Jordania and Kvali. They refused to publish it, whereupon Stalin insulted the editorial staff for “sitting in there for days without expressing a decent opinion!”

  Lado was also frustrated with Jordania’s gentility and it must have been he who introduced Stalin to the mainly Russian workers’ circles that were just starting to mushroom among the many small workshops of Tiflis. They met secretly at the German cemetery, at a little house beside a mill, and near the Arsenal. Stalin suggested they rent a room on Holy Mountain, “where we used to gather twice a week after dinner before call-over. It cost 5 roubles that we took from pocket-money our parents sent.” Stalin started to keep a “handwritten journal in Georgian about their discussions” which was passed from hand to hand among his followers in the seminary.7

  He was already crossing the line from rebellious schoolboy to a revolutionary who was, for the first time, of interest to the secret police. When another Marxist activist named Sergei Alliluyev, a skilled railway worker and Stalin’s future father-in-law, was arrested, he was interrogated by the Gendarme captain Lavrov, who asked him: “Know any Georgian seminarists?”8

  The romantic poet was becoming the “convinced fanatic” with a “quasimystical faith” to which he devoted his life and from which he never wavered. But what did he really believe?

  Let him explain in his own words. Stalin’s Marxism meant that “the revolutionary proletariat alone is destined by History to liberate mankind and bring the world happiness,” but humanity would undergo great “trial and suffering and change” before it achieved “scientifically proven socialism.” The heart of this providential progress was “the class struggle: Marxism is the masses whose liberation is the catalyst for the freedom of the individual.”

  This creed was, says Stalin, “not only a theory of socialism: it’s an entire worldview, a philosophical system”—like a scientifically proven religion—of which these young revolutionaries were part. “I had the feeling,” explained Trotsky, “I was joining a great chain as a tiny link.” Trotsky, like Stalin, believed that “the lasting thing is gained through combat.” Blood, death, conflict were essential: “Many storms, many torrents of blood,” in Stalin’s own words, would mark “the struggle to end oppression.”

  There was one big difference between Stalin and Trotsky then: Stalin was a Georgian. He never lost his pride in Georgia as a nation and a culture. The little nations of the Caucasus all found it hard to embrace real internationalist Marxism because their own repression made them also dream of independence. Young Stalin believed in a blend of Marxism and Georgian nationalism, almost opposed to internationalist Marxism.

  Soso, poring over his Marxist texts, was rude and truculent to the priests, but he was not yet in open revolt as other seminarists were, before and after him. His own propaganda later exaggerated the precocity of his becoming a revolutionary, but he was far from the first of his generation to become the real thing. So far he was a schoolboy radical just dipping his toes into revolutionary waters.9

  * Stalin was immersed in Georgian poetry: he loved Eristavi; Chavchavadze was “a great writer with a huge role in the freedom movement of Georgia;” and he enthused about Akaki Tsereteli: “My generation learned the poems of Tsereteli by heart and with joy . . . beautiful, emotional and musical, he’s rightly called the nightingale of Georgia.” But, looking back, Stalin also measured these poets politically, saying Tsereteli wrote “beautiful poems but ideologically primitive and parochial.” Stalin was not the only poetical future Bolshevik: at exactly the same time, at his school in Odessa, young Leon Bronstein, the future Trotsky and near contemporary, was also writing poems. Trotsky far outstripped Stalin as a writer but not as a poet. If any of Stalin’s colleagues had dedicated a poem to a prince, it would have been used against them in the Terror. In 1949, for Stalin’s official seventieth birthday, the Politburo magnate Beria secretly commissioned the best poetical translators, including Boris Pasternak and Arseni Tarkovsky, to create a Russian edition of the poems. They were not told the author of the poems but one of the poets thought “this work is worthy of the Stalin Prize first rank,” though perhaps they had guessed the identity of the young versifier. In the midst of the project, they received the stern order, clearly from Stalin himself, to stop the work.

  * “A hasty visit, especially if ladies are of the party,” suggests Baedeker, “is best made by carriage . . . Public safety is on a somewhat unstable footing; it is well to avoid travelling alone or the exhibition of much money (for permission to carry a revolver see earlier). It is advisable to keep a sharp lookout on one’s belongings as natives are not averse from picking up unconsidered trifles.” Baedeker adds that even a letter of introduction from the viceroy or to local princes are of limited use in “surmounting difficulties that arise: these can be successfully met only by a resolute bearing”—and probably with the help of the revolver mentioned earlier.

  * Hugo’s hero Cimourdain had “never been seen to weep . . . [he had an] inaccessible and frigid virtue. A just but awful man. There are no half-measures for a revolutionary-priest [who] must be infamous and sublime. Cimourdain was sublime . . . rugged, inhospitably repellent . . . pure but gloomy.”

  * These young Marxists would copy out Marx by hand and distribute the manuscripts. When his Gori friend Kote Khakhanashvili came home with some Marx volumes, Stalin borrowed them but then refused to return them: “Why do you need them? They’re being passed through many hands and people are learning from them.” He also purloined a German-language textbook. Yet his English and German studies never led to fluency: even in the early 1930s he was asking his wife, Nadya, to send him an English textbook to study on holiday.

  7

  Battle of the Dormitories:

  Soso versus Father “Black Spot”

  By early 1897, Stalin was at war with the Black Spot. The school journal records that he was caught thirteen times reading banned works and had received nine warnings.

  “Suddenly inquisitor Abashidze,” says Iremashvili, started launching raids on their footlockers and even their dirty laundry baskets. The maniacal “Black Spot” Abashidze became obsessed with catching Stalin reading his forbidden books. At prayers, the boys had the Bible open on their desks and read Marx or Plekhanov, the sage of Russian Marxism, on their knees. In the courtyard stood a huge pile of firewood in which Stalin and Iremashvili would hide the banned works and where they would sit and read them. Abashidze waited for this and then sprang out to catch them, but they managed to drop the books into the logs: “We were locked up in the detention cell a
t once, sitting late into the evening in darkness without food, but hunger made us rebellious so we banged on the doors until the monk brought us something to eat.”1

  When it was time for the holidays, Stalin went to stay with a younger friend, the priest’s son Giorgi Elisabedashvili, in his village (anything rather than spend time with his mother). The priest hired Stalin as a tutor to get Giorgi ready for the seminary’s entrance examinations. He always had a strong pedagogic instinct, but he was more interested in converting the boy to Marxism. Arriving on the back of a cart perched atop a pile of illegal books, the two made mischief in the countryside, laughing at peasants, whom Stalin “mimicked perfectly.” When they visited an old church, Stalin encouraged his pupil to pull down an old icon, smash it and urinate on it.

  “Not afraid of God?” asked Stalin. “Good for you!”

  Stalin’s pupil failed his exams. Father Elisabedashvili angrily blamed the tutor. But the boy got in on a second attempt—and later became one of Stalin’s Bolsheviks.2

  Back at the seminary, Stalin was in constant trouble: in the school journal, the priests recorded that he was rude, “failed to bow” to a teacher and was “confined to the cell for 5 hours.” He declined to cut his hair, growing it rebelliously long. Challenged by the Black Spot, he refused to cut it. He laughed and chatted in prayers, left Vespers early, was late for the Hymn of the Virgin, and pranced out of mass. He must have spent much of his time in the punishment cell. In December 1898, he turned twenty, much too old for boarding-school, and a year older than anyone else (because of time wasted recovering from his accidents). Small wonder he was frustrated.

  He had outgrown the seminary. Seminarists were meant to kiss one another, like brothers, thrice whenever they met, but now, embroiled in factional struggles with Devdariani and devoted to Marxism, he distrusted this chivalrous humbug. “Such embracing is merely a mask. I’m not a Pharisee,” he said, refusing to embrace. The obsession with masked traitors never left him.

  There were frenzied searches for the atheists’ Life of Christ by Renan, which Stalin proudly owned. His bedside table was repeatedly raided by the prince-monk-inquisitor—who found nothing. One of the boys cleverly hid the book under the rector’s own pillow. Stalin remembered how the boys would be summoned into call-over and then come out to find that all their footlockers had been ransacked.

  Soso was losing interest in his studies. By the start of his fifth grade he was twentieth out of twenty-three, scoring mainly 3s where he used to score 5s. He wrote to Rector Serafim blaming his bad studies on illness, but he still had to resit some of his exams.

  Meanwhile Black Spot “watched us ever more vigilantly” and the other boys were encouraged to inform on the rebels. But Stalin was get ting more daring and defiant by the week. When he and his allies started reading funny verses from his copybook, the sneaks reported it to Abashidze, who crept up and listened. He burst into the room and grabbed the journal. Stalin tried to snatch it back. Priest and teenager scuffled but the Black Spot won, frog-marching Stalin back to his flat where he “forced these unclean souls to douse their subversive writings” with paraffin. Then he set fire to the papers.

  Finally Abashidze intensified his spying on Stalin: “At 9 p.m., the Inspector noticed in the dining-room a group of pupils around Djugashvili who was reading them something. On approach, Djugashvili tried to hide the notes and only after insistence did he reveal he was reading unauthorized books. Signed: D. Abashidze.”

  Stalin’s mother heard “the evil talk that he had become a rebel.” Being Keke, she dressed up and took the train to Tiflis to save the day—but for the first time “he got angry with me. He shouted that it wasn’t my business. I said, ‘My son, you’re my only child, don’t kill me—but how will you be able to defeat Emperor Nicholas II? Leave that to those who have brothers and sisters.’” Soso soothed and hugged her, telling her that he was not a rebel. “It was his first lie,” remembers Keke sadly.

  She was not the only concerned parent. Stalin was still seeing his ne’er-do-well father, probably unbeknown to Keke.* Accompanied by his mother’s cousin Anna Geladze, Stalin visited Beso, who liked to present him with lovingly sewn boots. “I should mention,” adds Anna, “that Soso had liked wearing boots ever since childhood.” The dictator in jackboots was not just a militaristic pose but an unspoken tribute to his father and to the beautiful leather boots he made with his own hands.

  Perhaps his maturity had alleviated his fear of Beso, his Marxism softening his intolerance. Beso, now working humbly in a clothing-repair shop, came to “love his child doubly, talking about him all the time,” says Kote Charkviani. “Soso and I used to visit him. He didn’t raise his voice to Soso”—but he did mutter: “I hear he’s now rebelling against Nicholas II. As if he’s ever going to overthrow him!”

  The war between the Black Spot and Stalin was hotting up. The seminary journal reports that Stalin declared himself an atheist, stalked out of prayers, chatted in class, was late for tea and refused to doff his hat to monks. He had eleven more warnings.

  Their confrontations were increasingly farcical as the boys lost all respect for their inquisitor. Some of Soso’s buddies were chatting in Yerevan Square’s Pushkin Gardens when a boy ran out and reported that Stalin’s footlocker was being raided (again) by Father Abashidze. They sprinted back into the seminary just in time to see the inspector force open Stalin’s trunk and find some forbidden works. Abashidze grabbed them and was triumphantly bearing his prize up the stairs when one of the group, Vaso Kelbakiani, charged and rammed the monk, almost loosening his grip on the books. But Black Spot held on valiantly. The boys jumped on him and knocked the volumes out of his hands. Stalin himself ran up, seized the books and took to his heels. He was banned from visiting town, and Kelbakiani was expelled. Yet ironically Soso’s schoolwork seemed to improve—he received “very good” 4s for most subjects and a 5 for logic. Even now he still enjoyed his history lessons. Indeed he so liked his history teacher, Nikolai Makhatadze, the only seminary teacher he admired, that he later took the trouble to save his life.*

  Meanwhile, the Black Spot had lost control of Stalin but could not restrain his own obsessive pursuit of this malcontent. They were getting closer to the breaking point. The monk crept up on him and peeked at him reading yet another forbidden book. He then pounced, taking the book from him, but Stalin simply wrenched it out of his hands, to the amazement of the other boys. He then went on reading it. Abashidze was shocked. “Don’t you know who I am?” he shouted.

  Stalin rubbed his eyes and said, “I see the Black Spot and nothing else.” He had crossed the line.

  The Black Spot must have longed for someone to rid him of this turbulent trainee-priest. It was almost the end of term. Stalin earned a last reprimand on 7 April for not greeting a teacher and the school broke up two days later. He never returned. In May 1899, the journal simply noted, “Expelled . . . for non-appearance at examinations.” As always with Stalin, things were not quite so simple.3

  · · ·

  “I was expelled for Marxist propaganda,” Stalin boasted mendaciously later, but the Black Spot may have been investigating something spicier than just horseplay in the chapel or even Marxist meetings in the town.

  The boys with more pocket-money than Stalin used to hire rooms on Holy Mountain, purportedly to hold meetings of their liberal reading circle, but being teenage boys and Georgians, who prided themselves on their amours, it is likely there were parties there too, wine—and girls. The priests, especially Inspector Black Spot, also patrolled the town, like English public-school masters, to catch their boys in theatres, taverns or brothels.

  When he was not studying, Stalin could drink and flirt too. He may have got into more serious trouble in the holidays in Gori. Was it his love for the Charkviani girl? He never forgot her, talking about her in old age. Years later, he also remembered another girl from Gori, Lisa Akopova. In 1926, he actually tried to find out what had become of her, which suggests they were close.
This encouraged her to send him a letter: “I swear that the attention you show us by asking about us makes me very happy . . . I was always your inseparable friend in fortune and misfortune . . . If you’ve not forgotten . . . you were courted by your pretty neighbour Lisa.” This was daring stuff for the 1920s but not half as daring as another letter Stalin received in 1938.

  A woman wrote to Stalin about her niece, Praskovia Mikhailovskaya—Pasha, for short—who was allegedly fathered by Stalin himself in 1899. “If you remember your youth, you cannot forget. You certainly remember a small dark-eyed girl named Pasha.” The letter claims that Stalin’s mother had taken an interest in the child, who herself remembered Keke. Pasha’s mother told her that her father “had devoted himself to saving the nation and had been exiled.” Pasha grew up into a “tall svelte dark-eyed Georgian beauty,” became a typist, and got married, but her mother and husband both died, leaving her destitute. She disappeared into 1930s Moscow.

  The letter may be the sort of crazed correspondence attracted by politicians, except for the fact that Stalin, who did not keep much in his personal archive, filed the letter. The mention of his mother rings true, for Keke surely would have helped her beloved Soso in a situation that can hardly have been unknown among the young Casanovas of Georgia. Besides, only someone telling the truth—or a lunatic with a death wish—would have dared to write such a letter to Stalin at the height of the Great Terror. Had Stalin no history of abandoned mistresses and children, one would dismiss this. But henceforth he rarely seems to have been without a girlfriend, and he had no compunction in abandoning fiancées, wives and children. We will never know, but in terms of character and timing, it is plausible.4

  If such an event was discovered by Father Abashidze or if Keke feared that the seminary was likely to find out, it might explain her role in his leaving. Soso spent the Easter of 1899 at home in Gori, claiming to be sick with chronic pneumonia. Perhaps he really was ill. “I took him out of school,” Keke asserted. “He didn’t want to leave.” But she must have been bitterly disappointed.