Stalin, Volume 1

CHAPTER 1

AN IMPERIAL SON

My parents were uneducated people, but they treated me not so badly.

Stalin, December 1931, interview with Emil Ludwig, German journalist1

OVER THE MORE THAN FOUR CENTURIES from the time of Ivan the Terrible, Russia expanded an average of fifty square miles per day. The state came to fill a vast pocket bounded by two oceans and three seas: the Pacific and the Arctic; the Baltic, the Black, and the Caspian. Russia would come to have a greater length of coastline than any other state, and Russian fleets would be anchored at Kronstadt, Sevastopol, and (eventually) Vladivostok.2 Its forests linked Russia to Europe, and its steppe grasslands, 4,000 miles wide, connected Russia to Asia and afforded a kind of “new world” to discover.

That said, the Russian empire defied nearly every possible prerequisite: its continental climate was severe, and its huge open frontiers (borderless steppes, countourless forests) were expensive to defend or govern.3 Beyond that, much of the empire was situated extremely far to the north. (Canadian agriculture was generally on a line with Kiev, far below the farms surrounding Moscow or St. Petersburg.) And although land was plentiful, there never seemed to be enough bodies to work it. Incrementally, the autocracy had bound the peasantry in place through a series of measures known as serfdom. Peasant mobility was never fully eliminated—serfs could try to run away, and if they survived, were usually welcomed elsewhere as scarce labor—but serfdom remained coercively entrenched until its emancipation, beginning in 1861.4

Russia’s outward march, which overcame substantial resistance, transformed its ethnic and religious makeup. As late as 1719, Russia was perhaps 70 percent ethnic Great Russian (and more than 85 percent total Slav), but by the end of the following century Russians made up just 44 percent (Slavs around 73 percent); in other words, a majority of the population (56 percent) was other than Great Russian. Among the other Slavs, Little Russians (or Ukrainians) stood at 18 percent, Poles at 6 percent, and White Russians (or Belorussians) at 5 percent. There were smaller numbers of Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Finns, Germans, Georgians, Armenians, Tatars, Qalmyqs, and Siberian indigenes. In 1719, Russia had no Jews, but thanks to the late-eighteenth-century swallowing up of Poland, Jews would come to compose around 4 percent of the empire. They were legally confined (with exceptions) to the annexed territories in which they already lived—that is, old Poland-Lithuania and parts of western Ukraine, lands that constituted the Pale of Settlement.5 They were forbidden from owning land, rendering them more urban and more professional than the rest of Russia’s population. But for all the historical attention focused on Russia’s 5 million Jews, it was Russia’s Muslims, present going back to ancient Muscovy, who constituted the empire’s second largest religious grouping after Eastern Orthodox Christians. Imperial Russia’s Muslims had one of the realm’s highest birthrates, and would come to exceed 18 million people, more than 10 percent of the population. Many of Russia’s Muslims spoke a dialect of Persian, but most spoke Turkic languages, giving Russia several million more Turkic speakers than the “Turkish” Ottoman empire.

Russia’s territorial aggrandizement had often come at Ottoman expense, as in the conquest of the Caucasus. These formidable mountain redoubts, wedged between the Black and Caspian seas, were higher than the Alps, but on either side of the chain, adjacent to the seashores, could be found narrow, easily passable lowlands—paths to conquest. In the western parts of the Caucasus, Turkic long served as a lingua franca, reflecting Ottoman rule; in the eastern parts, it was Persian, reflecting Iranian rule. Troops loyal to the Russian tsar had first reached the Caspian Sea in 1556—for a time, Ivan the Terrible took a Caucasus Turkic princess as a wife—but the Russian empire did not manage to seize Baku, the main Caspian settlement, from the Persian shah until 1722.6 And it was not until the 1860s or so that generals in the Russian service managed to claim the entire uplands. In other words, the Russian advance into the Caucasus proceeded vertically, in essence a giant flanking maneuver around and then up the mountains that consumed more than 150 years and uncounted lives.7 In Dagestan (“the mountainous land”), a territory that resembled British India’s tribal northwest frontier, Russian counterinsurgency troops butchered entire indigenous villages to force them to give up suspected insurgents; the insurgents, for their part, directed vendettas against the indigenous Muslims, too, accused of cooperating with Russia. Also devastating were the axes of Slav peasant settlers, who moved into the steep yet fertile valleys and, to grow crops, removed the forest cover critical to the rebels. To top everything off, in the final drive to conquest in the 1860s and 70s, perhaps four hundred thousand of half a million highlander Circassians were driven or fled across the Ottoman border.8 These deportations and massacres, accompanied by Slavic peasant homesteading, facilitated Russia’s assimilation of the Caucasus, which is how the future Stalin would be born a subject of Russia.

All the ad hoc empire building—and there is no other kind—resulted in a jumble of contradictions. The so-called Old Believers, Eastern Orthodox Christians who refused to recognize the reformed Orthodox Church or the Russian state and had been banished or fled to the “remote” Caucasus, found they could survive only by supplying services to “the Antichrist,” that is, to the Russian imperial army. Even so, the empire’s Cossack shock troops, once free and wild frontiersmen who had become paladins of autocracy, remained chronically undersupplied and had to turn to the very mountaineers they were trying to subjugate in order to purchase weaponry. In turn, the antiempire mountaineers, with their picturesque cherkeskas—long woolen coats sporting rifle cartridges slotted across the chest—were recruited into the Retinue of the Tsar in St. Petersburg.9 Perhaps the greatest contradiction lay in the circumstance that the Russian empire had been implanted in the Caucasus largely by invitation: Georgia’s Christian rulers were battling both the Muslim Ottomans and the Muslim Safavids and invited Christian Russia’s protection. That “protection,” in practice, was effected by opportunistic imperial agents close to the scene, and soon took the form of annexations, in 1801 and 1810.10 Russia terminated the Georgian Bagrationi dynasty and replaced the patriarch of the formerly independent Georgian Orthodox Church with a Russian Orthodox Church metropolitan (called an exarch). And yet, in another contradiction, the local “Russian” administration overflowed with Georgians, who were favored as fellow Christians. Thanks to Russian rule, Georgian elites obtained powerful new instruments for imposing their will over the lower orders, and over the many other peoples in the Caucasus. Such is empire: a series of bargains empowering the ambitious.

Within the Russian empire, Georgia was its own imperial project.11 Of the 8.5 million inhabitants of the Caucasus enumerated in the late nineteenth century, about a third were Muslim, while one half were Eastern Orthodox, but of the latter only 1.35 million were ethnic Georgians (by language). This minority came to rule more than ever thanks to Russia. Of course, far from everything under Russian suzerainty was to Georgian liking. In 1840, imperial authorities in St. Petersburg decreed Russian as the sole language for official business in the Caucasus. This followed Russia’s suppression (in 1832) of a conspiracy to restore the Georgian monarchy (some Georgian nobles had planned to invite local Russian officials to a ball and murder them). Most of the conspirators were exiled elsewhere within the Russian empire, but soon they were allowed to return and resume careers in Russian state service: the empire needed them. A majority of Georgian elites would become and remain largely Russophile.12 At the same time, new infrastructure helped overcome barriers to tighter Russian incorporation. Between 1811 and 1864, a key military road was cut southward from the lowland settlement of Vladikavkaz (“rule the Caucasus”) up through the high mountain pass—above seemingly bottomless chasms—on to Tiflis, the capital. Before the century was out, the Transcaucasus Railway would link the Black and Caspian seas. Above all, career opportunities induced many Georgians to master the Russian language, the greatest element of imperial infrastructure. Georgians memorized and retold stories about Georgia’s heroic resistance to Russian conquest, but if they could, they also married into elite Russian families, indulged in Russian operas, and hankered after the peacock fan of imperial uniforms, titles, and medals along with the commodious state apartments, travel allowances, and cash “gifts.”13 What worked for elites became available on a lesser scale to the lower orders, who took advantage of the opportunities to go to new Russian-language schools in the Caucasus sponsored by the Russian Orthodox Church. Here, then, was the imperial scaffolding—conquest via Georgian collusion, Russification via the Orthodox Church—on which the future Stalin would climb.14

SMALL-TOWN IDYLL

The future Stalin’s hometown of Gori (“hill”), nestled in the rolling uplands of the Eastern Georgian valley of the Mtkvari River (Kura River, in Russian), had for centuries served as a caravan stop at the junction of three roads: one westward to the Black Sea, one eastward to the Caspian, and one northward through the Tskhinvali Pass to the steppe grasslands.15 Gori, in other words, was no boondocks. In the heart of town, atop its highest hill, stood the yellow crenellated walls of a thirteenth-century fortress. Additional ruins, the gardens of grandees from when Gori had been the capital of the Georgian state of Kartli in the seventeenth century, could be found outside town. Also not far away were the famed mineral waters of Borzhomi, where Alexander II’s brother, viceroy of the Caucasus, had erected a summer residence. In Gori proper, directly below the ancient fortress ruin, lay the Old Town. A second district, the Central Quarter, boasted numerous Armenian and Georgian churches, while a third, housing the barracks of the imperial garrison, was christened the Russian Quarter.16 In 1871, this crossroads became a junction of the Russian empire railway that opened between Tiflis, the Caucasus capital, and Poti, a Black Sea port (conquered from the Ottomans in 1828). In the 1870s, Gori’s narrow, crooked, filthy streets were home to perhaps 7,000 inhabitants, of whom a slight majority was Armenian, the rest being Georgian, with a few hundred Russians as well as some Abkhaz and Ossetians, who had migrated from nearby tribal villages. Gori merchants traded with Iran, the Ottoman empire, and Europe. Thanks to its strong merchant presence, as well as to the Orthodox Church, Gori had four schools, including a solid two-story church school founded by church authorities in 1818, not long after Georgia’s incorporation into the Russian empire.17 The upshot was that whereas in Tiflis one in fifteen inhabitants attended school—versus one in thirty for the entire Caucasus—in Gori one in ten inhabitants were in school.18 For boys born on that “hill,” doors could open to the future.

The future Stalin’s father, Besarion Jughashvili (1850–1909), known as Vissarion in Russian and Beso for short, did not hail from Gori. His paternal grandfather (Zaza), a serf once arrested for his part in a peasant uprising, may have lived in a tribal Ossetian village; Beso’s father, Vano, also a serf, tended vines in a village called Didi Lilo (“Greater Lilo”), population under 500, where Beso was born. Vano would carry his grapes to nearby Tiflis, about ten miles away, but he died before the age of fifty. Soon thereafter, bandits killed Vano’s son Giorgi, an innkeeper, and Beso quit Didi Lilo to seek work in Tiflis, where he learned the shoemaker’s trade at an Armenian-owned shop. Beso spoke some Armenian, Azeri Turkish, and Russian, though it is unclear whether he could write in his native Georgian. Around 1870, when he was twenty, he relocated to Gori, evidently at the invitation of another Armenian entrepreneur, Baramyants (Russified as Iosif Baramov). The latter owned a shoe workshop that had been commissioned to supply the imperial garrison in Gori.19 The Russian empire was one far-flung garrison. By 1870, all of Siberia was secured by just 18,000 troops, but Kharkov, Odessa, and Kiev garrisoned 193,000 soldiers; Warsaw, another 126,000. At a time when British India counted 60,000 troops and 1,000 police, the Caucasus had 128,000 imperial soldiers. That made for a lot of feet needing boots. Baramyants hired a number of master artisans, including Beso, who seems to have enjoyed success and evidently was ambitious. Aided financially by “Prince” Yakobi “Yakov” Egnatashvili, a Gori wine grower, dukhan (pub) owner, and wrestling champion, Beso soon opened his own cobbler shop, becoming a self-standing artisan.20

Beso dispatched a matchmaker to win the hand of Ketevan “Keke” Geladze, said to be a slender, chestnut-haired teenage beauty with big eyes.21 She, too, was both the offspring of serfs and a striver. Her surname was common in southern Ossetia, leading to speculation that she also had Ossetian blood, but like Beso’s, her native tongue was Georgian. Keke’s father, a bricklayer and serf who gardened for a wealthy Armenian and lived in a village outside Gori, married another serf, but he seems to have passed away before (or right after) Keke was born. Unusually, Keke’s mother made sure the girl learned to read and write; at the time, very few Georgian females were literate. But Keke’s mother, too, died, and the girl was raised by her mother’s brother, also a serf. Serfdom in Georgia was extraordinary even by crazy-quilt imperial Russian standards: the leading Georgian nobles could own minor nobles as well as priests, while priests could own minor nobles. Partly that was because the tsarist state showed considerable deference to the expansive Georgian nobility, which accounted for 5.6 percent of Georgia’s population, versus 1.4 percent for nobles in the empire as a whole. Serfdom’s abolition in the Caucasus began three years later than in the rest of the Russian empire, in October 1864. That was about when Keke’s family relocated from the village to Gori. “What a happy journey it was!” she reminisced to an interviewer late in life. “Gori was festively decorated, crowds of people swelled like the sea.”22 The Geladzes were free, but they faced the challenge of making a new life.

Keke’s wedding to Beso, in May 1874 in Gori’s Cathedral of the Assumption, took place in the grand Georgian style, with a boisterous, ostentatious procession through the town.23 Yakov Egnatashvili, Beso’s benefactor, served as one of Beso’s best men. Father Kristopore Charkviani, another family friend, was said to have sung so beautifully at the ceremony that Prince Yakov tipped the priest the princely sum of 10 rubles. Beso, like most Georgians—literate or illiterate—could quote from Shota Rustaveli’s twelfth-century The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, an epic about three chivalrous friends who rescue a damsel from being forced into a marriage. Beso liked to wear a long Circassian blackcoat, cinched with a leather belt, over baggy trousers, which he tucked into leather boots—an epigone of Caucasus manhood. True, he was known to drink some of his shoemaker earnings; then again, as per local custom, his customers often paid him with homemade wine. For all his typical faults, though, Keke viewed the artisan as a step up. “He was considered a very popular young man among my friends and they were all dreaming of marrying him,” she recalled to the interviewer. “My friends nearly burst with jealousy. Beso was an enviable groom, a true Georgian knight, with beautiful mustaches, very well dressed—and with the special sophistication of the town dweller.” Beso, she added, could be “unusual, peculiar, and morose,” but also “clever and proud.” “Among my friends,” Keke concluded, “I became the desired and beautiful girl.”24

In December 1878, four years into the marriage, when Keke was around twenty and Beso twenty-eight, the couple had a son, Ioseb—the future Stalin.25 Ioseb was actually Beso and Keke’s third son, which by Georgian and Eastern Orthodox tradition was viewed as a special gift of God. But their prior children had not survived. Beso and Keke’s firstborn, Mikheil, had died in early 1876, age two months; their second (Giorgi) had died in June 1877, after about half a year.26 Ioseb, whose diminutive in Georgian was “Soso” (or “Soselo”), grew up an only child, learning later of his brothers’ ghosts. The three-person family rented a small timber-and-brick, single-room house from an Ossetian artisan. It was located in Gori’s Russian Quarter, near the barracks of the imperial troops whose footwear Beso made. A mere ninety square feet, the structure had a table and four stools, a plank bed, a samovar, a trunk, and a kerosene lamp. Clothes and other belongings were placed on open shelves. There was a cellar, however, reached by winding stairs, and it was here that Beso kept his tools and opened his workshop, and Keke made a nursery for Soso.27 Stalin’s life, in other words, began in a basement.

The humble circumstances notwithstanding, the Jughashvili family story had the makings of a small-town idyll: the artisan, the beauty, and the (surviving) boy. Keke is said to have never let him out of her sight.28 From around the age of two, Soso suffered the litany of childhood diseases (measles, scarlet fever), and Keke, fearful of losing yet another child, went to church frequently to pray. She also produced insufficient milk, so Soso had to suck the breasts of their neighbors: Mrs. Egnatashvili as well as neighbor Masho Abramidze-Tsikhitatrishvili. Still, he grew, and was full of life. “He was a stubborn little boy,” recalled Masho. “When his mother called him and he didn’t feel like responding, he didn’t stop playing.”29

GEOPOLITICAL RUPTURE, SURROGATE FAMILY SUCCOR

Running the streets of his Georgian hill town, little Soso was oblivious to the wider world, but in the same decade he was born, Germany had ostentatiously proclaimed the founding of the Second German Reich—the first had been the loose Holy Roman Empire—in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, where the great French Sun King Louis XIV had once received the many little German princes. Their geopolitical rupture of German unification and its follow-on rapid industrialization radically altered Russia’s geopolitical space. Less ostentatiously, but almost as consequentially, in Japan in 1868, a group of rebels overthrew the Tokugawa Shogunate in Edo (Tokyo) and, as a way to legitimize their rebellion, nominally “restored” the dormant emperor, who took the name Meiji (enlightened rule). The process was by no means smooth, as major regions rebelled. But by 1872–73, nearly every important member of Japan’s new leadership had traveled in an embassy to Europe and America, seeing firsthand not only the marvels of the advanced world, but also seeing that the advanced world was not a monolith. Japan’s new leaders decided to take full advantage, adapting elements of each country separately: the centralized educational system of France appealed to them more than the looser American one, but instead of the French army, they eventually chose the German system of professional officers and a general staff, while opting for a British-style navy. “Knowledge,” proclaimed the Meiji emperor, “shall be sought throughout the world, and thereby shall be strengthened the foundation of the imperial polity.” This proclamation encapsulated the secret of great power ascendancy for the ages. To be sure, the new schools and other foreign imports were often resisted; it would take state power to force the transformation. Moreover, Japan’s follow-on industrialization did not match Germany’s. That said, Japan’s economy took off, too, and dramatically transformed the balance of power in Asia, as a new power rose on Russia’s other flank.

Also in the same decade the future Stalin was born, the United States of America had become the world’s largest integrated national economy. The United States had only recently descended into a civil war, which claimed 1 million casualties, including 600,000 dead out of a population of 32 million, while also introducing ironclad ships, overhead balloon reconnaissance, trench warfare, and long-range rifles. (The war cut off the German journalist Karl Marx’s freelance income from a New York Tribune no longer as interested in European affairs.) Contrary to Confederate hopes, however, the North’s mills were not dependent on the South’s supplies of raw cotton (growers in Egypt and India could make up the shortfalls). Some British statesmen, including William Gladstone, had cheered on the South, hoping for a diminution in U.S. power, but the British government never recognized the Confederacy’s independence. Had an independent agrarian nation been victorious and consolidated in the U.S. South—one of the largest slave systems in the modern world—the British would have been doomed in the twentieth century, and the entire course of world events would have been radically altered. In 1860, the value of Southern slaves was three times the amount invested in manufacturing or railroads, representing more capital than any other American asset except land, but instead of the slave-based, cotton-growing South, the industrial North triumphed. Between 1870 and 1900, the reunited U.S. economy industrialized and tripled in size (with assistance from mass immigration from non-English-speaking, non-Protestant societies), producing a spectacular surge that eclipsed even the booms in Germany and Japan as the U.S. share of global output soared to nearly 30 percent. This American economic colossus, despite American colonial wars in the Philippines and Cuba, remained as yet mostly apart from world politics. Still, U.S. power had begun to loom over the world system, and would prove decisive in it.

These immense geopolitical facts that accompanied Stalin’s birth and early life—a unified industrial Germany, a consolidated industrial Japan, an American power greater than any other in world history—would shake the tsarist regime to its core and, one day, confront Stalin, too. Of course, young Soso Jughashvili could have no inkling of the geopolitical processes that were shaping his world. Meanwhile, in 1880s Gori, in a sign of middling success, the proud new father Beso Jughashvili took on two artisan apprentices. One of them remembered always seeing butter on the Jughashvili table, though the family appears to have lived modestly, eating mostly lobbio and lavash (red beans and flatbread) as well as potatoes and badrijani nigvzit (eggplants stuffed with spiced walnut paste).30 Another apprentice, Vano Khutsishvili, a mere one year younger than Soso, became like a foster brother for a time.31 Music filled the home—Keke would serenade Soso with the polyphonous harmonies of Georgian folk songs. Beso, like most Georgian men, could play traditional instruments such as the double-reed duduk (which he had played at their wedding). At the same time, Beso seems to have been something of a brooder. Few firsthand descriptions of him survive. One recalled him as “a thin man, taller than average. He had a long face and a long nose and neck. He wore a moustache and beard, and his hair was jet-black.” Later, various other men would be put forward as Stalin’s “real” father. But two witnesses have pegged Soso as Beso’s spitting image.32

Whatever Beso’s role as a father, and the original promise of his union with Keke, the marriage disintegrated. Most biographers, following Keke’s version, usually attribute the breakdown to Beso’s alcoholism and inner demons, asserting either that Beso was a natural drunkard or that he took to the bottle from grief after the early death of his firstborn son and never stopped.33 This may be true, although after that early tragedy, and particularly after the birth of Soso, Beso’s workshop seems to have operated for a time. To be sure, the traditional Georgian-style shoes that he made may have had trouble competing with newer European styles.34 That said, Keke, still young and pretty, may have been a cause of the trouble by flirting with married men: Yakov Egnatashvili, the Gori pub owner and wrestling champion; Damian Davrishevi, the Gori police officer; Kristopore Charkviani, the Gori priest—all of whom would be rumored as the future Stalin’s real father. Whether Keke was flirtatious, let alone promiscuous, is unclear. She had been ambitious in marrying Beso the artisan, and she may have moved on to more prestigious men. Perhaps they targeted her.35 Reliable evidence about the possible liaisons of the future Stalin’s mother is lacking. Still, gossip about Keke’s promiscuity circulated in Gori. Beso took to calling his son “Keke’s little bastard,” and once he appears to have tried to strangle his wife while denouncing her as a “whore.”36 (A common-enough epithet.) Beso is also thought to have vandalized the pub owned by Egnatashvili and to have attacked the police chief Davrishevi, who, in turn, may have ordered Beso to leave Gori. Around 1884, Beso did depart for Tiflis, hiring himself on at the Armenian-owned Adelkhanov Tannery.

Whoever was at fault, the result was a broken home.37 By 1883, Keke and little Soso began a vagabond existence, moving house at least nine times over the next decade. And that was not the young boy’s only misfortune. The same year his father left, little Soso contracted smallpox during an epidemic that ravaged many a Gori household. Three of their neighbor Egnatashvili’s six children perished. Keke appealed to a female faith healer. Soso survived the fevers. But his face was permanently scarred, and he got tagged with the moniker “Poxy” (Chopura). Probably around this time (1884), age six, Soso’s left elbow and shoulder began to develop abnormally, reducing the use of his left arm. Various causes have been put forward: a sleighing or wrestling accident; an accidental collision with a horse-drawn phaeton, which was followed by blood poisoning from an infected wound.38 Soso was indeed struck near Gori’s Roman Catholic cathedral by a rare (for Gori) phaeton, perhaps because he and other boys, in a game of chicken, would try to grab the axles.39 Still, his withering limb may have had a genetic cause. Be that as it may, the elbow worsened over time. Keke, though, proved ever resourceful. To support the two of them, she cleaned and repaired other people’s clothes and took care of their living quarters, including for the Egnatashvilis, where Soso often ate dinner. In 1886, she and Soso moved into the upper story of the home of Father Charkviani, one of Beso’s former boon drinking companions. The move was likely necessitated by poverty but also seems to have been calculated: Keke implored Charkviani to get Soso into the Gori church school for fall 1886, when he would be already nearly eight. Failing that, she begged the priest to allow his own teenage sons to include Soso in the Russian lessons they gave to their younger sister, on whom the young Stalin may have developed his first crush.

Keke’s scheming worked, thanks also to Soso’s own ambitions. Biographers have often singled out the future Stalin for leading a “street gang” in Gori, as if street running was somehow distinctive for male youths, in the Caucasus or elsewhere.40 Rather, what stood out were his bookworm and autodidact tendencies, which propelled him forward. In September 1888, nearing the age of ten, he joined some 150 boys, almost all of whom were seven or eight, in the parish school’s mandatory preparatory program for Georgian boys. It was a two-year course, but his bootstrapped Russian proved good enough to vault him through in a single year. In fall 1889, he began the main four-year school curriculum, where his studiousness as well as his sweet alto singing voice were prized—a source of pride for the boy. And finally, at least for part of the day, he was out of his mother’s grasp. On January 6, 1890, however, during the Feast of the Epiphany—celebrated in the Orthodox church as Jesus’ baptism in the river Jordan—a runaway phaeton in Gori lurched into the onlookers where the church-school choir stood. Struck a second time! “Soso wanted to run across the street, but did not make it in time,” recalled Simon Goglichidze, the Gori school choirmaster. “The Phaeton hit him, its connecting pole striking him in the cheek.”41 Soso lost consciousness and was carried home. How close the future Stalin, then eleven, came to death we will never know.42 The driver was jailed for a month. “Fortunately,” concluded Goglichidze, “the wheels only ran over the boy’s legs,” rather than his head.43 But the accident permanently inhibited the future Stalin’s gait, leading to a second derogatory nickname—“Crimped” (Geza).

Beso, it seems, arrived and took his injured son to Tiflis for medical treatment; Keke seems to have accompanied them, moving to the capital while Soso recuperated.44 This may be the event that gave rise to the story, much repeated, that Beso “kidnapped” his son because the cobbler was hell-bent against his boy attending school.45 The truth is murky. Beso appears to have voiced a desire to snatch Soso out of school, perhaps the year before, in 1889, and he may have been talked out of it (or forced to return the boy quickly). But the “kidnapping” might simply refer to the circumstance in 1890, once Soso had recovered, when Beso kept him in Tiflis, apprenticing him at the Adelkhanov Tannery. That huge enterprise was built in 1875, when Beso was living in Gori, by the Moscow-born Armenian magnate Grigory Adelkhanov, who had moved to Tiflis and become head of the city’s Armenian-dominated credit association in the 1870s. Adelkhanov’s plant was equipped with machines and from 1885 could turn out 50,000 pairs of footwear annually as well as 100,000 felt cloaks for the imperial troops. Its yearly revenue exceeded 1 million rubles, a colossal local sum in those days.46 Beso and son lodged in a cheap room in an old section of Tiflis (Havlabar) and walked to work together across the metal bridge over the Mtkvari River, past the medieval Metekhi church high on the rocky cliffs, which the Russian empire had rebuilt as a prison.47 Like Soso, many of the Adelkhanov laborers were underage, usually the children of adult workers who were expected to add to their fathers’ wages, a practice common at Tiflis factories.48 In other words, Beso’s desire for his son to follow in his footsteps and learn his trade, however selfish, was the norm.49

Thanks to his father, the future leader of the world proletariat had an early brush with factory life, which was nasty. Adelkhanov’s enterprise had a medical station, a benefit no other leather-working plant in Tiflis offered, but workdays were long, wages low, and job security precarious. The same mechanization that undercut independent artisans like Beso rendered elements of the factory’s own workforce redundant over time. Adelkhanov’s adult cobblers, moreover, were a rough lot, preying on the youngsters. As an apprentice, Soso may have served only as elder workers’ fetcher, not even learning to make shoes. He was certainly subjected to the sickening stench of putrid raw leather in the dank basement, immeasurably worse than the cellar in which his mother had tried (and failed) to nurse him. Had Soso Jughashvili remained a proletarian in training at Adelkhanov, or run away and become a street urchin, there would likely have been no future Stalin. Instead—as every biographer has observed—Keke pressed her well-cultivated church connections to help her retrieve her beloved boy. Much like Klara Hitler, a pious Catholic who would dream that her son Adolf would rise to become a pastor, so Keke Geladze believed her boy Soso was destined for the Orthodox priesthood, a path that the abolition of serfdom had opened up for children of his modest background.50 The boy would owe his return to the upward path of disciplined study and self-improvement to his determined mother.

Keke brooked no compromise. She rejected the Tiflis church authorities’ proposed solution that Soso be allowed to sing in their Tiflis church-school choir while remaining with his father. She accepted nothing less than Soso’s return to Gori for the start of the next school year in September 1890.51 Her triumph over her husband in a deeply patriarchal society was supported by family friends, who took the woman’s side, and by the boy himself: In the parental tug-of-war between becoming a priest (school) or a cobbler, Soso preferred school and, therefore, his mother. Unlike Beso, Keke was always ready to do whatever it took to make sure he had clothes on his back and his bills were paid. Ioseb “Soso” Iremashvili, who met the future Stalin by wrestling him on the parish school playground, recalled that his friend “was devoted to only one person—his mother.”52 And Keke, in turn, was devoted to him. Still, we should not idealize her. She was also domineering. “Stalin’s severity came from his mother,” recalled another Gori chum who later served as a lower-level member of the dictator’s bodyguard detail (in charge of wine and foodstuffs). “His mother, Ekaterina Geladze, was a very severe woman, and in general a difficult person.”53 Beso, for his part, seems to have followed his wife and son back to Gori. If so, this was not the first time he had implored Keke for reconciliation. But the 1890 episode of Soso’s recuperation and factory apprenticeship in Tiflis marked the final break in their marriage.54 Beso refused to support the family financially (for what that was worth), and back at the Gori school, Soso was expelled for his family’s failure to pay the 25-ruble tuition. “Uncle Yakov” Egnatashvili evidently stepped in and cleared the debt.

Uncle Yakov became Soso’s valued surrogate father.55 Much has been made over the young Stalin’s infatuation with a celebrated novel, The Patricide (1882), by Aleksandre Qazbegi (1848–93), who was the scion of a princely Georgian family (whose grandfather had taken part in Georgia’s annexation by Russia and obtained a mountain fief for it). The Russian imperial authorities targeted by Qazbegi’s novel banned it, enhancing its considerable allure. In the story, a peasant boy, Iago, and a beautiful girl, Nunu, fall in love, despite family disapproval, but a Georgian official collaborating with the Russian empire rapes Nunu and imprisons Iago on trumped-up charges. Iago’s best friend, Koba, a brave, laconic mountaineer (mokheve), swears an oath of revenge—“I’ll make their mothers weep!”—and organizes a daring prison break for Iago. The Georgian official’s men, however, kill Iago. Nunu dies from sorrow. But Koba vows revenge, hunts down and executes the arrogant official—“It is I, Koba!”—enforcing rough justice. Koba is the novel’s only surviving character, outliving his enemies and his friends.56 Among the young Stalin’s several dozen early pseudonyms—including, briefly, Besoshvili (son of Beso)—Koba was the one that stuck. “He called himself ‘Koba’ and would not have us call him by any other name,” recalled the childhood friend Ioseb Iremashvili. “His face would shine with pride and pleasure when we called him ‘Koba.’”57 This was the boy about him, one friend recalled, “We, his friends, would often see Soso . . . pushing his left shoulder slightly forward, his right arm slightly bent, holding a cigarette in his hand, hurrying through the streets among the crowds.” The avenger Koba (meaning the indomitable, in Turkish) was certainly more flattering than Crimped or Poxy. But it is worth underscoring that Soso Jughashvili’s surrogate father, Yakov Egnatashvili, also went by the nickname Koba, a kind of diminutive for his Georgian given name Yakobi.

Too much has been made of Beso’s failings, and not enough of Yakov “Koba” Egnatashvili’s support. Too much has also been made of the violence in Soso Jughashvili’s early life. Beso beat his son out of anger, humiliation, or for no reason; the doting Keke beat the boy, too. (Beso struck Keke, and Keke sometimes thrashed Beso for being a drunkard.)58 Of course, a sizable chunk of humanity was beaten by one or both parents. Nor did Gori suffer some especially violent Oriental culture. Sure, the annual commemoration of Great and Holy Monday (Easter week), recalling the 1634 expulsion of the Muslim Persians, entailed a nighttime all-Gori fistfight. The town divided into teams by ethnicity, reaching a thousand or more pugilists, and the brawl was refereed by drunken priests. Children launched the fisticuffs, before the adults joined, and Soso could not fail to take part.59 But such festive violence—madcap bare fists, followed by sloppy embraces—was typical of the Russian empire, from Ukrainian market towns to Siberian villages. Gori did not stand out in the least. Moreover, other violent activities attributed to the young Stalin are scarcely unheard of in boys. Wrestling tournaments were celebrated in Gori, and among schoolmates on the playground, the lanky, sinewy Soso was said to fight hard, albeit dirty, displaying significant strength despite his withered left arm. Some say he would not shrink from bouts with the strongest opponents and, on occasion, got beaten silly. But Soso was evidently trying to follow in the footsteps of his celebrated surrogate father—the Egnatashvili clan members, led by their patriarch, were Gori’s wrestling champions. “Little Stalin boxed and wrestled with a certain success,” recalled Iosif “Soso” Davrishevi, the policeman’s son.60

Beso’s trajectory, by contrast, was further downward. He appears to have left the Adelkhanov Tannery not long after he failed to reinstall his son there. He tried his luck repairing shoes at a stall in the Armenian bazaar in Tiflis, but that seems not to have panned out. Thereafter, nothing is reliably known of how he survived; some sources indicate that eventually Beso became a vagrant, though there are also indications he kept plying his trade, perhaps in a clothing repair shop.61 Later, the future Stalin would make light of his own “proletarian” origins resulting from his father’s downward social mobility. “My father was not born a worker, he had a workshop, with apprentices, he was an exploiter,” Stalin would tell his Red Army commanders in March 1938. “We lived none too badly. I was 10 when he went up in smoke [razorilsia] and became a proletarian. I would not say he entered the proletariat with joy. The whole time he cursed that he was unfortunate to enter the proletariat. But the circumstance that he was unlucky, that he went up in smoke, is made an achievement [zasluga] of mine. I assure you, this is a funny thing (laughter).”62 In point of fact, Beso had never gotten off the rolls of his village commune in Didi Lilo and, therefore, he remained a member of the peasant estate—a juridical status that Beso passed on to his son (as recorded on Stalin’s tsarist internal passports right through 1917). But although the future Soviet leader was a peasant de jure, and the son of a worker de facto, he himself, thanks to the support of Keke and “Uncle” Yakov, was rising up, into the demi-intelligentsia.

FAITH IN GOD

Back at school for the 1890-91 academic year, Soso was compelled to repeat the grade because of the phaeton accident, but he threw himself into his studies with ever greater determination. He was said never to have shown up late to classes, and to have spent his spare time behind books—subsequent reminiscences that ring true.63 “He was a very capable boy, always coming first in his class,” one former schoolmate recalled, adding “he was [also] first in all games and recreation.” Some classmates also recalled Soso as defiant when the Georgian boys were banished to the dunce corner for speaking their native tongue; some recalled he was not afraid, on other students’ behalf, to approach the teachers, who wore imposing state uniforms (tunics with gold buttons). If Soso did speak to the teachers on behalf of other boys, that was likely because he had been picked by the Russian-language teacher—christened the “gendarme”—to serve as class monitor, an enforcer of discipline. Whatever role he may have played as an intermediary, all the teachers, including the Georgian ones, appreciated Soso’s diligence and eagerness to be called upon.64 He sang Russian and Georgian folk songs, along with Tchaikovsky songs; studied Church Slavonic and Greek; and was chosen to read out the liturgy and sing the hymns at church. The school awarded him David’s Book of Psalms with the inscription: “To Iosif Jughashvili . . . for excellent progress, behavior and excellent recitation of the Psalter.”65 One schoolmate rhapsodized about Soso and other choirboys “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.”66

There was a prosaic side as well: To make ends meet, Keke cleaned the school (for 10 rubles a month). She may also have worked as a domestic at the home of the schoolmaster, though at some point she became a regular seamstress for a local “fancy” clothes shop and, finally, settled them into an apartment (on Gori’s Cathedral Street).67 But soon, for exemplary academic performance, Soso’s tuition was waived and on top of that he began receiving a monthly stipend of 3 rubles, later raised to 3.50 and then 7. This is perhaps the best evidence that the child from the broken home stood out as one of Gori’s best pupils.68 Graduating in spring 1894, at the advanced age of fifteen and a half, he could have gone on to the Gori Teachers Seminary, a further step up. An even better option presented itself: Choirmaster Simon Goglichidze was moving to the Tsar Alexander Teacher Training School in Tiflis and said he could bring his star Gori pupil along on a coveted fully funded state scholarship. That was no small matter for an indigent family. But instead, Soso sat the entrance examinations for the Theological Seminary in Tiflis, to become a priest. He excelled on the exams nearly across the board—Bible studies, Church Slavonic, Russian, catechism, Greek, geography, penmanship (though not in arithmetic)—and gained admission. It was a dream come true. The Tiflis seminary—alongside that city’s secular gymnasia (elite high schools) for the boys and girls of the prosperous—represented the highest rung of the educational ladder in the Caucasus, where the Russian imperial administration refused to countenance a university. The seminary’s six-year course of study (usually from age fourteen) led, at a minimum, to life as a parish priest or a village teacher in rural Georgia, but for those still more ambitious, the seminary could provide a stepping-stone to a university elsewhere in the empire.

In biography generally, the trope of the traumatic childhood—an outgrowth of the spread of Freudianism—came to play an outsized role.69 It is too pat, even for those with genuinely traumatic childhoods. The future Stalin’s childhood was certainly not easy: illnesses and accidents, forced house moving, straitened circumstances, a broken-down father, a loving but severe mother rumored to be a whore. But in adulthood, even as the dictator indulged roiling resentments that would seal the fate of most of his revolutionary colleagues, he would voice no special anger at his parents or his early life experiences. The future Kremlin leader experienced nothing of the bloody intrigues of the court childhoods of Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great (to both of whom he would often be compared). Ivan’s father died from a boil when the boy was three; his mother was assassinated when he was seven. The orphaned Tsar Ivan the Terrible was reduced (by his regents) to begging for his food, and he witnessed the elites’ murderous struggle for power in his name, coming to fear his own pending bloody demise. The young Ivan took to tearing off birds’ wings and throwing cats and dogs off buildings. Peter the Great’s father died when he was four. Thereafter, the boy’s life was under threat by the warring court factions that were connected to his father’s two widows. After Peter was made tsar at age ten, the losing faction rebelled, and the young Peter witnessed relatives of his mother and friends being thrown onto upraised pikes. To be sure, some analysts have exaggerated the horrors of Ivan’s and Peter’s childhoods, offering pseudopsychological explanations for their often cruel reigns. Still, the most that could be claimed about the young Jughashvili was that he might have seen his father once come after his mother with a knife.

Next to what Ivan and Peter had gone through, what were the future Stalin’s childhood tribulations? Consider further the early life of Sergei Kostrikov, known later under the revolutionary name Kirov, who would become Stalin’s closest friend. Born in 1886 in a small town in Vyatka province, central Russia, Kirov would be considered as among the most popular of Stalinist party leaders. But his childhood was difficult: four of Kirov’s seven siblings died in infancy, his father was a drunkard who abandoned the family, and his mother died of TB when the boy was just seven. Kirov grew up in an orphanage.70 A similar fate befell another key member of Stalin’s inner circle, Grigol “Sergo” Orjonikidze, whose mother died when he was an infant, and whose father died when he was ten. By contrast, the young Stalin had his doting mother and a variety of important mentors, as the strikingly numerous memoirs from that time indicate. Keke’s extended family lived close by, including her brother Gio and his children (Keke’s other brother, Sandala, would be killed by the tsarist police). And Beso’s family (his sister’s children) remained a presence even after Beso lost the custody showdown in 1890.71 Family was the glue of Georgian society, and Soso Jughashvili had not only his own extended kin, but the surrogate kin provided by the Egnatashvilis (as well as the Davrishevis). Smalltown Gori took care of its own, forming a tight-knit community.

In addition to his extended family and Gori schooling (a ticket upward), the future Stalin’s childhood had one more vital redeeming aspect: faith in God. His destitute family had to find the means for the Orthodox seminary’s hefty annual tuition (40 rubles) and room and board (100 rubles), as well as for his surplice school uniform. The sixteen-year-old Jughashvili petitioned for a scholarship and was granted a partial one: free room and board.72 For tuition, Keke appealed to Soso’s surrogate father, Koba Egnatashvili. Big Koba had the means to send his two surviving natural sons to a gymnasium in Moscow, and he came through for little Koba (Soso), too. But if the well-heeled Egnatashvili, or others, had ceased to support Soso, or if the Russian rector at the seminary withdrew the partial state scholarship, Jughashvili’s studies would have been jeopardized. He had taken a big risk by declining the full state scholarship at the secular teacher training school arranged by Choirmaster Goglichidze. The reason must have been that not only Keke but her son, too, was devout. “In his first years of study,” allowed a Soviet-era publication of reminiscences, “Stalin 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 observe them.”73 Studying among the monks at the seminary, the future Stalin may have thought to become a monk himself. But changes in the Russian empire and in the wider world opened up a very different path.74