Stalin, Volume 1

CHAPTER 2

LADO’S DISCIPLE

Others live off our labor; they drink our blood; our oppression quenches their thirst with the tears of our wives, children, and kin.

Leaflets, in Georgian and Armenian, distributed by Iosif Jughashvili, 19021

TIFLIS EXUDED A HAUNTING, magical beauty. Founded in a gorge in the fifth century, the residence of Georgian kings from the sixth, Tiflis—its Persian name, also employed in Russian—was centuries older than ancient Kiev, let alone upstart Moscow or St. Petersburg. In Georgian the city was called Tblisi (“warm place”), perhaps for its fabled hot springs. (“I must not omit to mention,” enthused one nineteenth-century visitor, “that the baths of the city cannot be surpassed even by those of Constantinople.”)2 Back when Russia annexed eastern Georgia, in 1801, Tiflis had about 20,000 inhabitants, fully three quarters of them Armenian. By century’s end, Tiflis had mushroomed to 160,000, with a plurality of Armenians (38 percent), followed by Russians and Georgians, and a smattering of Persians and Turks.3 The city’s Armenian, Georgian, and Persian neighborhoods ascended up the hills, their houses terraced in, with multilevel balconies perched one above the other in a style reminiscent of the Ottoman Balkans or Salonika. By contrast, the flat Russian quarter stood out for its wide boulevards where one could find the imposing Viceroy’s Palace, Opera House, Classical Gymnasium No. 1, Russian Orthodox cathedral, and the private homes of Russian functionaries (chinovniki) and of the Armenian haute bourgeoisie. Imperial Russia’s 1860s Great Reforms had introduced municipal governing bodies with restricted franchise elections, and wealthy Armenians came to compose the vast majority of those eligible to vote in Tiflis’ municipal elections, allowing Armenian merchants to control the city duma. But they had no hold on the imperial executive administration, which was run by appointed Russians, ethnic Germans, and Poles, often relying on Georgian nobles, who enriched themselves through state office.4 Still, the Georgians—no more than a quarter of the urban population—were to an extent upstaged in their own capital.

The urban distribution of power was glaring. On the wide tree-lined Golovin Prospect, named for a Russian general, the shops carried signs in French, German, Persian, and Armenian as well as Russian. Wares on offer included fashions from Paris and silks from Bukhara, useful for marking status, as well as carpets from nearby Iran (Tabriz), which helped distinguish interior spaces. By contrast, over at the city’s labyrinthine Armenian and Persian bazaars, underneath the ruins of a Persian fortress, “everyone washes, shaves, gets a haircut, dresses and undresses as if at home in their bedroom,” explained a Russian-language guide to the warrens of silversmiths and cooking stalls serving kebabs and inexpensive wines.5 Tatar (Azeri) mullahs could be seen in their green and white turbans, while Persians went about in caftans and black-fur caps, their hair and fingernails dyed red.6 One observer described a typical square (Maidan), near where Soso Jughashvili had briefly resided with his father in 1890, as “a porridge of people and beasts, sheepskin caps and shaved heads, fezzes and peaked caps,” adding that “all shout, bang, laugh, swear, jostle, sing, work, and shake in various tongues and voices.”7 But beyond the Oriental riot of its streets—which made the guidebook writers ooh and aah—the years of the 1870s through 1900 saw a crucial transformation of society by the railroad and other industrialization, as well as a Georgian national awakening facilitated by an expanding periodical press and the connections from modern transportation. By 1900, Tiflis had acquired a small but significant intelligentsia and a growing industrial-worker class.8

It was in this modernizing urban milieu that Jughashvili—who was back in Tiflis as of 1894—entered the seminary and came of age, becoming not a priest but a Marxist and revolutionary.9 Imported to Georgia in the 1880s, Marxism seemed to offer a world of certainties. But Jughashvili did not discover Marxism on his own. A headstrong twentysomething militant, Vladimir “Lado” Ketskhoveli (b. 1876) would serve as the revolutionary mentor for the future Stalin, who in looking back would call himself a disciple of Lado.10 Lado was the fifth of six children born to a priest from a village just outside Gori. Three years Jughashvili’s senior at the Gori church school and then at the Tiflis Theological Seminary, Lado acquired tremendous authority among the seminarians. Under Lado’s influence, the young Jughashvili, already an energetic autodidact, found a lifelong calling in being an agitator and a teacher, helping the dark masses see the light about social injustice and a purported all-purpose remedy.

GEORGIAN CULTURAL NATIONALIST

Compared with small-town Gori, the Caucasus capital offered a grand drama of incipient modernity, but Iosif Jughashvili did not see much of the city, at least not initially. His immediate world, the theological seminary, was dubbed the Stone Sack—a four-story bastion of neoclassical façade. If the main classical gymnasium stood at the pinnacle of the local educational hierarchy, the seminary—more accessible to poor youth—was not far behind. The building, at the southern end of Golovin Prospect on Yerevan Square, had been purchased by the Orthodox Church from a sugar magnate (Constantine Zubalashvili) to serve as the new home of the seminary in 1873. For the hundreds of students who lived on the top floor in an open-style dormitory, their daily regime generally lasted from 7:00 a.m. until 10:00 p.m. Ringing bells summoned them to morning prayers, followed by tea (breakfast), classes until 2:00 p.m., a midday main meal at 3:00, then a mere hour or so outside the walls, roll call at 5:00, evening prayers, tea (a light supper) at 8:00, homework, and lights out. “Day and night we were worked within barrack walls and felt like prisoners,” recalled another Gori “Soso,” Ioseb Iremashvili, who like the young Stalin was attending the seminary by way of the Gori church school.11 Occasional leaves were granted to return to one’s native village or town, but otherwise Sundays alone afforded some free time—but only after Orthodox Church services, which meant standing for three to four hours on stone tiles. Trips to the theater and other blasphemies were proscribed. Some seminarians, however, dared to escape to town after nightly roll call, despite the random night dormitory checks to ferret out reading of illicit materials by candlelight or onanism.

The regimentation for the teenage seminarians accustomed to indulgent families and the free play of the streets had to be frustrating, but the seminary also offered endless opportunity for passionate discussions with fellow students about the meaning of existence and their own futures, as well as the discovery of books and learning. Emphasis fell on sacred texts, of course, and on Church Slavonic and Russian imperial history. Ioseb “Soso” Jughashvili, now known in Russified form as Iosif, was in his element, and he performed well. He became the school choir’s lead tenor, a high-profile achievement, given how much time the boys spent in church and preparing for church. He also developed into a voracious reader who started keeping a notebook of thoughts and ideas. In the classroom, he earned mostly grades of 4 (B), while achieving 5s (A’s) in ecclesiastical singing, and earned 5 rubles for occasional singing in the Opera House. In the beginning years his only 3s (C’s) came in final composition and Greek. He received the top mark (5) in conduct. As a freshman, Jughashvili placed eighth in a group of twenty-nine, and as a sophomore he rose to fifth. But in his third year, 1896-97, his rank slipped to sixteenth (of twenty-four), and by the fifth year he stood twentieth (of twenty-three), having failed scripture.12 Because classroom seating was determined by academic results, his desk kept being moved farther from the teachers. Even the choir he loved so much ceased to hold his interest, partly because of recurrent lung problems (chronic pneumonia).13 But the main cause of his declining interest and performance stemmed from a culture clash brought on by modernizing forces and political reactions.

In 1879, the year after Jughashvili had been born, two Georgian noblemen writers, Prince Ilya Chavchavadze (b. 1837) and Prince Akaki Tsereteli (b. 1840), had founded the Society for the Spread of Literacy Among Georgians. Georgians comprised many different groups—Kakhetis, Kartlians, Imeretians, Mingrelians—with a shared language, and Chavchavadze and Tsereteli hoped to spark an integrated Georgian cultural rebirth through schools, libraries, and bookshops. Their conservative populist cultural program intended no disloyalty to the empire.14 But in the Russian empire, administratively, there was no “Georgia,” just the two provinces (gubernias) of Tiflis and Kutaisi, and such was the hard-line stance of the imperial authorities that the censors forbade any publication of the term “Georgia” (Gruziya) in Russian. Partly because many censors did not know the Georgian language—which was written neither in Cyrillic nor Latin letters—the censors proved more lenient with Georgian publications, which opened a lot of space for Georgian periodicals. But at the Tiflis seminary, to compel Russification, Georgian language instruction had been abolished in favor of Russian in 1872. (Orthodox services in Georgia were conducted in Church Slavonic and thus were largely unintelligible to the faithful, as they were even in the predominantly ethnic Russian provinces of the empire.) From 1875, the seminary in the Georgian capital ceased teaching Georgian history. Of the seminary’s two dozen teachers, all of whom were formally appointed by the Russian viceroy, a few were Georgian but most were Russian monks, and the latter had been expressly assigned to Georgia because of their strong Russian nationalist views. (Several would later join radical-right movements.) In addition, the seminary employed two full-time inspectors to keep the students under “constant and unremitting supervision”—even in the seminarians’ free time—while recruiting snitches for extra eyes and ears.15

Expulsions for “unreliability” became commonplace, defeating the educational purpose of the seminary. In response to the heavy-handedness, Tiflis seminarians—many of them the sons of Orthodox priests—had begun (in the 1870s) to produce illegal newsletters and form secret discussion “circles.” In 1884, a member of one such Tiflis seminary circle, Silibistro “Silva” Jibladze (who had led a revolt back in his junior seminary), struck the Russian rector in the face for denigrating Georgian as “dogspeak.” As the boys well knew, the kingdom of Georgia had converted to the Christian faith half a millennium before the Russians did, and more than a century before the Romans. Jibladze was sentenced to three years in a punishment battalion. Then, in 1886, to empirewide notoriety, a different expelled student assassinated the Tiflis seminary rector using a traditional Caucasus dagger (kinjal).16 More than sixty seminarians were expelled. “Some go so far as to excuse the assassin,” reported the exarch of Georgia to the Holy Synod in St. Petersburg. “All in their hearts approve.”17 By the 1890s, the seminary students were staging strikes. In a boycott of classes in November 1893, they demanded better food (especially during Lent), an end to the brutal surveillance regime, a department of Georgian language, and the right to sing hymns in Georgian.18 The Russifying ecclesiastics responded by expelling eighty-seven students—including the strike’s seventeen-year-old leader, Lado Ketskhoveli—and shutting the doors in December 1893.19 The seminary reopened in fall 1894 with two first-year classes, the 1893 and the 1894 admissions, the latter being Iosif Jughashvili’s.

When the future Stalin started at the seminary, the harsh disciplinary mechanisms remained, but in a concession, courses in Georgian literature and history were reinstituted. In summer 1895, after his first year, Jughashvili, then sixteen and a half, took his own Georgian-language verses in person to the publishing nobleman Ilya Chavchavadze, without seminary permission. The editor of Chavchavadze’s newspaper Iveria (a term for Eastern Georgia) published five of Jughashvili’s poems, under the widely used Georgian nickname for Ioseb/Iosif: Soselo.20 The verses, among other themes, depict the contrast between violence (in nature and man) and gentleness (in birds and music), as well as a wandering poet who is poisoned by his own people. Another poem served as a contribution to the fiftieth jubilee of the Georgian nobleman Prince Rapiel Eristavi, the young Stalin’s favorite poet.21 Eristavi’s verses, the dictator would later say, were “beautiful, emotional, and musical,” adding that the prince was rightly called the nightingale of Georgia—a role to which Jughashvili himself might have aspired. An affectionate sixth Jughashvili poem, “Old Ninika,” published in 1896 in Kvali (The Furrow), the journal of another Tsereteli, Giorgi (b. 1842), featured a heroic sage narrating “the past to his children’s children.” In a word, Jughashvili, too, was swept up in the emotional wave of the fin-de-siecle Georgian awakening.

The spirit of the times that affected the young Jughashvili was well captured in the poem “Suliko” (1895), or “Little Soul,” about lost love and lost national spirit. Written by Akaki Tsereteli, the cofounder of the Georgian Society, “Suliko” was set to music and became a popular anthem:

In vain I sought my loved one’s grave;

Despair plunged me in deepest woe.

Overwhelmed with bursting sobs I cried:

“Where are you, my Suliko?”

In solitude upon a thornbush

A rose in loveliness did grow;

With downcast eyes I softly asked:

“Isn’t that you, Oh Suliko?”

The flower trembled in assent

As low it bent its lovely head;

Upon its blushing cheek there shone

Tears that the morning skies had shed.22

As dictator, Stalin would sing “Suliko” often, in Georgian and Russian translation (in which form it would become a sentimental staple on Soviet radio). But in 1895–96, he had to conceal his own Georgian-language poetry publishing triumph from the Russifying seminary authorities.

Nationalism, of course, marked the age. Adolf Hitler, who had been born in 1889 near Brannau am Inn, in Austria-Hungary, was influenced by the shimmer of Bismarck’s German Reich almost from birth. Hitler’s father, Alois, a passionate German nationalist of Austrian citizenship, worked as a customs official in the border towns on the Austrian side; his mother, Klara, her husband’s third wife, was devoted to Adolf, one of only two of their five children to survive. Hitler moved with his family across the border, at age three, to Passau, Germany, where he learned to speak German in the lower Bavarian dialect. In 1894, the family moved back to Austria (near Linz), but Hitler, despite having been born and spending most of his formative years in the Habsburg empire, never acquired the distinctive Austrian version of German language. He would develop a disdain for polyglot Austria-Hungary and, with his Austrian-German speaking friends, sing the German anthem “Deutschland uber Alles”; the boys greeted each other with the German “Heil” rather than the Austrian “Servus.” Hitler attended church, sang in the choir, and, under his mother’s influence, spoke about becoming a Catholic priest, but mostly he grew up imagining himself becoming an artist. An elder brother’s death at age sixteen from measles (in 1900) appears to have severely affected Hitler, making him more moody, withdrawn, indolent. His father, who wanted the boy to follow in his footsteps as a customs official, sent him against his wishes to technical school in Linz, where Hitler clashed with his teachers. After his father’s sudden death (January 1903), Hitler’s performance in school suffered and his mother allowed him to transfer. Hitler would graduate (barely) and in 1905 move to Vienna, where he would fail to get into art school and lead a bohemian existence, jobless, selling watercolors and running through his small inheritance. The German nationalism, however, would stick. By contrast, the future Stalin would exchange his nationalism, that of the small nation of Georgia, for grander horizons.

STUDENT POLITICS

“If he was pleased about something,” recalled a onetime close classmate, Peti Kapanadze, of Jughashvili, he “would snap his fingers, yell loudly, and jump around on one leg.”23 In the fall of his third year (1896), when his grades would start to decline, Jughashvili joined a clandestine student “circle” led by the upperclassman Seid Devdariani. Their conspiracy may have been aided partly by chance: along with others of weak health, Jughashvili had been placed outside the main dormitory in separate living quarters, where he evidently met Devdariani.24 Their group had perhaps ten members, several from Gori, and they read non-religious literature such as belles lettres and natural science—books not even banned by the Russian authorities but banned at the seminary, whose curriculum excluded Tolstoy, Lermontov, Chekhov, Gogol, and even works of the messianic Dostoyevsky.25 The boys obtained the secular books from the so-called Cheap Library run by Chavchavadze’s Georgian Literacy Society, or from a Georgian-owned secondhand bookshop. Jughashvili also acquired such books from a stall back in Gori operated by a member of Chavchavadze’s society. (The future Stalin, recalled the bookseller, “joked a lot, telling funny tales of seminary life.”)26 As at almost every school across the Russian empire, student conspirators smuggled in the works to be read surreptitiously at night, concealing them during the day. In November 1896, the seminary inspector confiscated from Jughashvili a translation of Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea, having already found him with Hugo’s Ninety-Three (about the counterrevolution in France). Jughashvili also read Zola, Balzac, and Thackeray in Russian translation, and countless works by Georgian authors. In March 1897, he was caught yet again with contraband literature: a translation of a work by a French Darwinist that contradicted Orthodox theology.27

The monks at the seminary, unlike most Russian Orthodox priests, led a celibate existence, forswore meat, and prayed constantly, struggling to avoid the temptations of this world. But no matter their personal sacrifices, dedication, or academic degrees, to the Georgian students, they came across as “despots, capricious egotists who had in mind only their own prospects,” especially rising to bishop (a status in the Orthodox tradition linked to the apostles). Jughashvili, for his part, might well have lost his interest in holy matters as a matter of course, but the seminary’s policies and the monks’ behavior accelerated his disenchantment, while also affording him a certain determination in resistance. He appears to have been singled out by a newly promoted seminary inspector, Priestmonk Dmitry, who was derided by the students as the “Black Blob” (chernoe piatno). The rotund, dark-robed Dmitry had been the seminary’s teacher of holy scripture (1896) before becoming an inspector (1898). Even though he was a Georgian nobleman whose secular name was David Abashidze (1867–1943), he showed himself to be even more Georgia phobic than the chauvinist ethnic Russian monks. When Abashidze confronted Jughashvili over possession of forbidden books, the latter denounced the seminary surveillance regime, called him a Black Blob, and got five hours in a dark “isolation cell.”28 Later in life, during his dictatorship, Stalin would vividly recall the seminary’s “spying, penetrating into the soul, humiliation.” “At 9:00 am, the bell for tea,” he explained, “we go into the dining hall, and then return to our rooms, and it turns out that during that interval someone has searched and turned over all our storage trunks.”29

The estrangement process was gradual, and never total, but the seminary that Jughashvili had worked so hard to get into was alienating him. The illicit reading circle to which he belonged had not been revolutionary in intent, at first. And yet rather than accommodate and moderate student curiosity, for what was after all the best belles lettres and modern science, the theologians responded with interdiction and persecution, as if they had something to fear. In other words, it was less the circle than the seminary itself that was fomenting radicalism, albeit unwittingly. Trotsky, in his biography of Stalin, would colorfully write that Russia’s seminaries were “notorious for the horrifying savagery of their customs, medieval pedagogy, and the law of the fist.”30 True enough, but too pat. Many, perhaps most, graduates of Russian Orthodox seminaries became priests. And while it was true that almost all the leading lights of Georgia’s Social Democrats emerged from the Tiflis seminary—like the many radical members of the Jewish Labor Federation (Bund) produced at the famed Rabbinical School and Teachers’ Seminary in Wilno—that was partly because such places provided an education and strong dose of self-discipline.31 Seminarians populated the ranks of imperial Russia’s scientists (such as the physiologist Ivan Pavlov, of dog reflex fame), and the sons and grandsons of priests also became scientists (such as Dimitri Mendeleev, who invented the periodic table). Orthodox churchmen gave the entire Russian empire most of its intelligentsia through both their offspring and their teaching. Churchmen imparted values that endured their sons’ or students’ secularization: namely, hard work, dignified poverty, devotion to others, and above all, a sense of moral superiority.32

Jughashvili’s discovery of inconsistencies in the Bible, his poring over a translation of Ernest Renan’s atheistic Life of Jesus, and his abandonment of the priesthood did not automatically mean he would become a revolutionary. Revolution was not a default position. Another major step was required. In his case, he spent the 1897 summer vacation in the home village of his close friend Mikheil “Mikho” Davitashvili, “where he got to know the life of the peasants.”33 In Georgia, as in the rest of the Russian empire, the flawed serf emancipation had done little for the peasants, who found themselves trapped between land “redemption” payments to their former masters and newly uninhibited bandits who descended from mountain redoubts to exact tribute.34 The emancipation did “liberate” the children of the nobility, who, without serfs to manage, quit their estates for the cities and, alongside peasant youth, took up the peasantry’s cause.35 Jughashvili’s Georgian awakening evolved toward recognition of Georgian landlord oppression of Georgian peasants: the boy who had perhaps wanted to become a monk now “wished to become a village scribe” or elder.36 But his sense of violated social justice linked up with what appears to be his ambition for leadership. In the illegal circle at the seminary, Jughashvili and the elder Devdariani were boon companions but also competitors for top position.37 In May 1898, when Devdariani graduated and left for the Russian empire’s Dorpat (Yurev) University in the Baltic region, Jughashvili got his wish, taking over the circle and driving it in a more practical (political) direction.38

Iosif Iremashvili—the other Gori “Soso” at the seminary—recalled that “as a child and youth he [Jughashvili] was a good friend so long as one submitted to his imperious will.”39 And yet it was right around this time that the “imperious” Jughashvili acquired a transformative mentor—Lado Ketskhoveli. Lado, after his expulsion for leading the student strike in 1893, had spent the summer reporting for Chavchavadze’s newspaper Iveria on postemancipation peasant burdens in his native Gori district; after that, as per regulations, Lado was permitted to enroll in a different seminary, which he did (Kiev) in September 1894. In 1896, however, Lado was expelled from Kiev, too, arrested for possession of “criminal” literature, and deported to his native village under police surveillance. In fall 1897, Lado returned to Tiflis, joined a group of Georgian Marxists, and went to work in a printer’s shop to learn typesetting so he could produce revolutionary leaflets.40 He also reestablished contact with the Tiflis seminarians. Ketskhoveli was a recognized authority among them: his photograph hung on the wall of the seminarian Jughashvili’s room (along with photos of Mikho Davitashvili and Peti Kapanadze).41 Even though the Cheap Library of Chavchavadze’s Georgian Literacy Society might have had a few Marxist texts, including perhaps one by Marx himself (A Critique of Political Economy, part of the Das Kapital trilogy), book-wise Tiflis was a far cry from Warsaw.42 Lado, beginning in 1898, served as the main source of the young Stalin’s transition from the typical social-justice orientation known as Populism to Marxism.43

MARXISM AND RUSSIA

Karl Marx (1818–83), born to a well-off middle-class family in Prussia, was by no means the first modern socialist. “Socialism” (the neologism) dates from the 1830s and appeared around the same time as “liberalism,” “conservatism,” “feminism,” and many other “isms” in the wake of the French Revolution that began in 1789 and the concurrent spread of markets. One of the first avowed socialists was a cotton baron, Robert Owen (1771–1858), who wanted to create a model community for his employees by paying higher wages, reducing hours, building schools and company housing, and correcting vice and drunkenness—a fatherlike approach toward “his” workers. Other early socialists, especially French ones, dreamed of an entirely new society, not just ameliorating social conditions. The nobleman Count Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) and his followers called for social engineers under public, not private, property, to perfect society, making it fraternal, rational, and just, in an updated version of Plato’s Republic. Charles Fourier (1772–1837) introduced a further twist, arguing that labor was the center of existence and should be uplifting, not dehumanizing; to that end, Fourier, too, imagined a centrally regulated society.44 Not all radicals embraced centralized authority, however: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65) attacked the banking system, claiming that big bankers refused to grant credit to small property owners or the poor, and advocated for society to be organized instead on the basis of cooperation (mutualism) so that the state would become unnecessary. He called his smaller-scale and cooperative approach anarchism. But Marx, along with his close collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820–95), a British factory owner, argued that socialism was not a choice but “the necessary outcome” of a larger historical struggle governed by scientific laws, so that, like it or not, the-then current epoch was doomed.

Many adherents of conservatism, too, denounced the evils of markets, but what made Marx stand out among the foes of the new economic order was his full-throated celebration of the power of capitalism and modern industry. Adam Smith’s Scottish Enlightenment tome, Wealth of Nations (1776), had put forth influential arguments about competition, specialization (the division of labor), and the power of self-interest to increase social betterment. But in The Communist Manifesto (1848), a crisply written pamphlet, the-then twenty-nine-year-old Marx waxed lyrical about how “steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production” and how “the need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe.”45 These breakthroughs to “giant modern industry” and globalism, described by Marx in 1848 as accomplished facts, remained decades away, even in Britain, despite the industrial transformation there during Marx’s German childhood. But Marx anticipated them. When explicitly looking into the future, Marx, unlike Smith, stipulated that global capitalism would lose its dynamism. In 1867, he published the first volume of what would become the trilogy called Das Kapital, responding to the classical British political economist David Ricardo as well as Smith. Marx posited that all value was created by human labor, and that the owners of the means of production confiscated the “surplus value” of laborers. In other words, “capital” was someone else’s appropriated labor. The proprietors, Marx argued, invested their ill-gotten surplus value (capital) in labor-saving machinery, thereby advancing production and overall wealth, but also reducing wages or eliminating jobs; while the laborers, according to Marx, became locked in immiseration, capital tended to become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, inhibiting further development. In the interest of further economic and social progress, Marx called for abolition of private property, the market, profit, and money.

Marx’s revision of French socialist thought (Fourier, Saint-Simon) and British political economy (Ricardo, Smith) rested on what the German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had called the dialectic: that is, on a supposedly in-built logic of contradictions whereby forms clashed with their opposites, so that historical progress was achieved through negation and transcendence (Aufhebung). Thus, capitalism, because of its inherent contradictions, would give way, dialectically, to socialism. More broadly, Marx argued that history proceeded in stages—feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and communism (when everything would be plentiful)—and that the decisive motor was classes, such as the proletariat, who would push aside capitalism, just as the bourgeoisie had supposedly pushed aside feudalism and feudal lords. The proletariat in Marx became the bearer of Hegel’s universal Reason, a supposed “universal class because its sufferings are universal”—in other words, not because it worked in factories per se, but because the proletariat was a victim, a victim turned redeemer.

Marx intended his analysis of society to serve as the leading edge in efforts to change it. In 1864, he joined with a diverse group of influential leftists in London, including anarchists, to establish a transnational body for uniting the workers and radicals of the world called the International Workingmen’s Association (1864–76). By the 1870s, critics on the left had attacked Marx’s vision for the organization—to “centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class”—as authoritarian, provoking recriminations and splits. After Marx’s death in 1883 in London (where he was buried), various socialist and labor parties founded a “Second International” in Paris (1889). In place of the “bourgeois-republican” “Marseillaise” of the 1789 French Revolution, the Second International adopted “L’Internationale”—the first stanza of which begins “Arise, ye wretched of the earth”—as the socialist anthem. The Second International also adopted the red flag, which had appeared in France as a stark contrast to the white flag of the Bourbon dynasty and of the counterrevolutionaries who wanted to restore the monarchy after its overthrow. Despite the French song and symbolism, however, German Social Democrats—devotees of the deceased Marx—came to dominate the Second International. Subjects of the Russian empire, many of them in European exile, would become the chief rivals to the Germans in the Second International.

In imperial Russia, the idea of socialism had taken hold nearly a half century before a proletariat had appeared and owed its phenomenal spread to the introspection of a self-described intelligentsia. The latter—literally, the intelligence of the realm—were educated yet frustrated individuals who initially came from the gentry, but over time also emerged from commoners granted access to high schools and universities. Russia’s intelligentsia absorbed the same German idealist philosophy that Marx had, only without the heavy materialism that came from British political economy. Organized in small circles (Russian kruzhok, German Kreis), Russian socialists defended the dignity of all by generalizing from a sense of their own violated dignity. Alexander Herzen and Mikhail Bakunin, two mid-nineteenth-century sons of great privilege who knew each other, led the way. Each believed that in Russia the peasantry could serve as the basis for socialism because of the institution of the commune.46 Communes furnished a collective buffer against frosts, droughts, and other challenges through periodic redistribution among households of land allotments (in separated strips) as well as other means.47 Many peasants did not live under the commune, especially in the east (Siberia) as well as the west and south (Ukraine), where there had been no serfdom. But in the central regions of the Russian empire, the commune’s powers were strengthened by the 1860s serf emancipation.48 Because peasants in communes held no private property as individuals—either before or after emancipation—thinkers such as Herzen and Bakunin imagined the empire’s peasants to be inherently socialist and therefore, they argued, in Russia socialism could appear essentially before capitalism. Armed with just such thinking in the aftermath of the 1860s serf emancipation, self-described Populists (narodniki), descended upon Russia’s villages to lift peasants out of backwardness.

The Populists were in a hurry: capitalism had begun to spread and the Populists feared that the freed serfs were being turned into wage slaves, with the exploitative bourgeoisie taking the place of serf owners. At the same time, the much idealized egalitarianism of village life was thought to be under threat by the appearance of the kulak, or rich peasant.49 But even poor peasants met the outside would-be tutors with hostility. After Populism’s tactic of agitation failed to foster mass peasant uprising, some turned to political terror to spark mass uprising in cities (which would also fail). Other radicals, however, shifted their hopes from peasants to the incipient proletariat, thanks to the growing influence of Marx in Russia. Georgi Plekhanov (b. 1857), the father of Marxism in Russia, attacked the Populist argument that Russia could obviate capitalism because it possessed some supposed indigenous tendency (the peasant commune) toward socialism. Plekhanov went into European exile in 1880 (for what would turn out to be thirty-seven years), but his works in the 1880s—Socialism and Political Struggle (1883) and Our Differences (1885)—filtered back into Russia and made the case that historical stages could not be skipped: Only capitalism made socialism possible, and therefore Russia, too, would have to have a “bourgeois revolution” first, before a socialist revolution, even if the proletariat had to help the bourgeoisie achieve the bourgeois revolution.50 This was what Marx had said. Late in life, though, Marx did seem to admit that England’s experience, from which he had generalized, might not be universal; that the bourgeoisie might not be uniquely progressive (in historical terms); and that Russia might be able to avoid the full-blown capitalist stage.51 This apparent heresy had emerged from Marx’s reliance on the Russian economist Nikolai F. Danielson, who served as his confidant and supplied him with books on Russia. Still, the late Marx’s quasi-Populist views on Russia were not widely known (they would not appear in Russian until December 1924). Plekhanov’s Marxist critique of Populism held intellectual sway.

Danielson himself fed this dominance by collaborating on a Russian translation of Das Kapital, Marx’s three-volume magnum opus, which appeared in the 1890s and attracted a fair audience of readers—including the future Stalin. In 1896, with publication of the third volume, the hesitant Russian censor finally recognized it as a “scientific” work, meaning it could circulate in libraries and be offered for sale.52 By this time, Marxist political economy had appeared as an academic subject at some Russian universities, and even the turn-of-the-century director of one of the empire’s largest textile plants in Moscow collected a vast trove of Marxiana.53 Russia was then a country of 1 million proletarians and more than 80 million peasants. But Marxism displaced Populism as “the answer.”

Marxism had spread to the Russian-controlled Caucasus as well, also beginning in the 1880s. It came partly from the leftist movements in Europe, via Russia, but also from the ferment in Russian Poland, whose influence reached Georgia through Poles sent into exile in the Caucasus or Georgians who studied in tsarist Poland. Georgian Marxism was also spurred by generational revolt. Noe Jordania emerged as the Plekhanov of the Caucasus. He had been born in 1869 into a noble family of western Georgia, attended the Tiflis Theological Seminary, and along with others like Silva Jibladze, the Tiflis seminarian who had slapped the Russian rector’s face in 1884, established the Third Group (Mesame Dasi) in 1892. They aimed to contrast their avowedly Marxist association with the conservative Populism of Ilya Chavchavadze (First Group) and the national (classical) liberalism of Giorgi Tsereteli (Second Group). Traveling in Europe, Jordania had come to know Karl Kautsky, the Prague-born leading German Social Democrat, as well as Plekhanov. In 1898, at the invitation of Giorgi Tsereteli, Jordania took over the editorship of the periodical Kvali.54 Under him, Kvali became the Russian empire’s first legal Marxist periodical, stressing self-government, development, and Georgian cultural autonomy within Russian borders (reminiscent of the Austrian Social Democrats in the multinational Habsburg realm). Before long, Marxist literature—including 100 mimeographed copies of The Communist Manifesto translated from Russian into Georgian—would be smuggled into Tiflis and bolster the widening circles of young Caucasus radicals such as Jughashvili.55

Tiflis became their organizing laboratory. The city of petty traders, porters, and artisans, surrounded by a restive countryside, had 9,000 registered craftsmen, mostly in one- and two-person artels. Around 95 percent of its “factories” were workshops with fewer than ten laborers. But the big railroad depots and workshops (which had opened in 1883), together with several industrial tobacco plants and the Adelkhanov Tannery, did assemble a proletariat of at least 3,000 (up to 12,500 in the province as a whole). Tiflis railway workers had walked off the job in 1887 and 1889, and in mid-December 1898 they did so again, for five days—a major strike that Lado Ketskhoveli and other workers organized. Jughashvili was in the seminary during that Monday-to-Saturday workweek job action.56 But thanks to Ketskhoveli, Jughashvili’s seminary student circle—which he had just come to control by May 1898—broadened to include half a dozen or so proletarians at the Tiflis railway depot and workshops. They usually met on Sundays, in Tiflis’ Nakhalovka (Nadzaladevi) neighborhood, which was bereft of sidewalks, streetlights, sewers, or running water.57 Jughashvili lectured workers on “the mechanics of the capitalist system,” and “the need to engage in political struggle to improve the workers’ position.”58 Through Lado, he met the firebrand Silva Jibladze, who seems to have played a role in teaching Jughashvili how to agitate among the workers and in assigning him new “circles.”59 Jibladze may also have been the person to introduce Jughashvili to Noe Jordania.

Sometime in 1898, Jughashvili went to call upon Jordania at Kvali, just as Jughashvili had once approached the aristocrat Chavchavadze at the periodical Iveria (which then published his poetry). Gentle and professorial, the aristocrat Jordania, who projected little of a radical countenance, later recalled that his brash young visitor told him, “I have decided to quit the seminary to propagate your ideas among the workers.” Jordania claims he quizzed the young Jughashvili on politics and society, then advised him to return to the seminary and to study Marxism more. The condescending advice was not well received. “I’ll think about it,” the future Stalin is said to have replied.60 In August 1898, Jughashvili did join the Third Group of Georgian Marxists, following in Lado Ketskhoveli’s footsteps.

The Third Group, technically, was not a political party, which were illegal in tsarist Russia, but in March 1898, in a private log house in the outskirts of Minsk, a small town in the empire’s Pale of Settlement, a founding “congress” of the Marxist-inspired, German copycat Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDRP)—the future ruling party of the Soviet Union—took place. This was the second attempt (a previous effort to found the party, in Kiev, had failed). The Jewish Labor Bund (or Federation), which had been established five months earlier, provided logistical support for the Minsk gathering. There were a mere nine attendees, and just one actual worker (leading some present to object to their prospective party’s name [“Workers’”].* The year 1898 happened to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, and the delegates, during the three-day gathering, approved their own manifesto, a withering denunciation of “the bourgeoisie,” which they decided needed to be redrafted in order to be circulated, a task given to Pyotr Struve (b. 1870), the son of the Perm governor and an imperial law school graduate.61 (“The autocracy created in the soul, thoughts, and habits of educated Russians a psychology and tradition of state apostasy,” Struve later explained.)62 The tsarist political police knew nothing of the Minsk congress, but the attendees were already on watch lists and soon most were arrested.63 Vladimir Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, learned of the 1898 Minsk congress while off in Eastern Siberia serving a three-year term of internal exile, following fifteen months in prison, for disseminating revolutionary leaflets and plotting to assassinate the tsar. Minsk would turn out to be the only prerevolutionary RSDRP congress held on Russian empire territory.64 But soon, in European exile, a group of socialist exiles that included Plekhanov, his two satellites Pinchas Borutsch (aka Pavel Axelrod) and Vera Zasulich as well as the upstarts Julius “Yuly” Tsederbaum (aka Martov) and Lenin, published a Russian-language newspaper, initially out of Stuttgart in December 1900. Aiming to unite Russia’s revolutionaries around a Marxist program, it was called Iskra (Spark), as in “from a spark a fire will ignite.”65

AGITATOR, TEACHER

The future Stalin (like Lenin) would date his “party membership” from 1898. Back at the seminary, in fall and winter 1898–99, his infractions accumulated: arriving late at morning prayers; violating discipline at liturgy (evidently leaving early, complaining of leg pain while standing so long); arriving three days late from a leave in Gori; failing to greet a teacher (the former Inspector Murakhovsky); laughing in church; denouncing a search; leaving Vespers. Jughashvili received reprimands and had to do time in the seminary’s solitary-confinement cell. On January 18, 1899, he was forbidden to leave the premises for the city proper for one month, evidently in connection with a discovery of a large cache of forbidden books. (Another student caught was expelled.)66 More consequentially, following the Easter break, Jughashvili failed to sit his year-end exams. A May 29, 1899, entry in a Georgian exarchate official organ noted of Jughashvili: “dismissed [uvolniaetsia] from seminary for failure to appear at the examination for unknown reason.”67 This dismissal, with its enigmatic phrase “unknown reason,” has been the subject of varying interpretations, including Stalin’s own (subsequent) boast that he was “kicked out of an Orthodox theological seminary for Marxist propaganda.”68 But on more than one occasion, before he became ruler, he would state that he had suddenly been assessed a fee and could not pay it, and that going into his final year he faced the loss of his partial state financial support. Each time, however, he neglected to specify why he lost his state scholarship.69 There also seems to be no extant indication that he appealed for financial help to Egnatashvili or another benefactor. And no such failure to pay was recorded in the formal expulsion resolution. Still, his straitened circumstances were well known (many times Jughashvili had implored the rector for financial assistance), and it could be that the disciplinarians, led by Inspector Abashidze, contrived to rid themselves of Jughashvili by exploiting his poverty.70

Four years after Jughashvili’s 1899 expulsion, Abashidze would be promoted—ordained a bishop, a clear stamp of approval for his work.71 In fact, the seminary’s Russification policies had failed. Already in 1897–98, the Caucasus authorities seem to have concluded that the Tiflis seminary was harming Russia’s interests and should be closed (according to the memoirs of one teacher). Rather than closing it right away, however, the ecclesiastics decided to institute a purge of the ethnic Georgian students.72 The seminary forwarded lists of transgressing students to the gendarmerie.73 In September 1899, forty to forty-five seminarians were forced out “at their own request.” Soon, Georgian students would disappear from the seminary entirely. (The seminary would be altogether shuttered in 1907.)74 Jughashvili could have been expelled as part of the large group in fall 1899. But Abashidze’s vendetta may explain why Jughashvili’s expulsion was done individually instead. Even so, we are left with the curiosity that no reason was given for Jughashvili’s failure to sit his exams, and that he apparently did not petition to resit them. One possible clue: the year Jughashvili left the seminary he may have fathered a baby girl—Praskovya “Pasha” Georgievna Mikhailovskaya, who, in her adulthood, resembled him strongly.75 Jughashvili’s student circle was renting a hovel in Tiflis at the foot of holy Mount Mtatsminda for conspiratorial meetings, but the young men could also have used it for trysts.76 Later, Stalin would place a letter he received about the paternity in his archive. If such circumstantial evidence can be accepted, that might explain why Jughashvili faced the loss of his state scholarship and did not appeal to resit his exams or to have his state funding reinstated.77

But biographers have noted further curiosities. Upon dismissal, Jughashvili owed the state more than 600 rubles—a fantastic sum—for failing to enter the priesthood or otherwise serve the Orthodox Church (or at least become a schoolteacher). The rectorate wrote him a letter suggesting he become a teacher at a lower-level church school, but he did not take up the offer; yet the seminary does not appear to have employed the secular authorities to force him to make good his financial obligation.78 And then this: in October 1899, without having paid the money he owed, Jughashvili requested and received an official seminary document testifying to his completion of four years of study (since his fifth remained incomplete). The expellee was assigned an overall “excellent” (5) for conduct.79 These curiosities, in which, ordinarily, payment of a bribe would be suspected, may or may not be meaningful. When all is said and done, the future Stalin may have just outgrown the seminary, being two years older than his cohort and already deeply involved in Lado’s revolutionary activities. Jughashvili was not going to join the priesthood, and a seminary recommendation to continue his studies at university seemed unlikely. The expulsion, Jughashvili supposedly confided to one schoolmate, was a “blow,” but if so, he did not fight to stay.80

Jughashvili remained a book person, and more and more imagined himself in the role of teacher. He spent the summer of 1899 not in Gori but, again, in the village of Tsromi, with his buddy Mikho Davitashvili, a priest’s son. They were visited by Lado Ketskhoveli. The police searched the Davitashvili’s household but, it seems, the family had been forewarned, and the search turned up nothing. Still, Mikho was among the large group who did not continue at the seminary in September 1899 “at his own request.”81 Jughashvili would add many of the newly expelled boys from the seminary to the self-study circle he led.82 He also continued to meet with and give lectures to workers. Then, in December 1899, not long after he had obtained his official seminary four-year study document—which he may have sought for employment purposes—Jughashvili landed a paying job at the Tiflis Meteorological Observatory, a state agency. It was a stroke of luck, but also linked to his association with the Ketskhovelis: Vano Ketskhoveli, Lado’s younger brother, worked at the observatory and Jughashvili had already moved in with Vano in October 1899; a bit later, conveniently, one of the six employees left.83 Jughashvili got paid relatively good money: 20–25 rubles per month (at a time when the average wage in the Caucasus was 14–24 rubles for skilled labor, and 10–13 for unskilled).84 Besides shoveling snow in winter and sweeping dust in summer, he recorded temperatures and barometric pressures hourly. The future Stalin also spent a great deal of time reading and he became a dedicated agitator. When he had the night shift, during the day he could read up on Marxism or lecture groups of workers, which became his absolute passion.

Further inspiration came from questioning the socialist establishment. In solidarity with Lado Ketskhoveli, who sometimes hid overnight at the observatory, Jughashvili looked askance at Jordania’s Kvali. As a legal publication, Kvali had to pass censorship and show restraint, offering a “diluted Marxism” that was anathema to younger radicals. Kvali’s feuilletons, Ketskhoveli and Jughashvili argued, “did nothing” for actual workers. Lado dreamed about starting his own illegal periodical and recruiting more young propagandists like Jughashvili.85 Jordania and his supporters opposed an illicit periodical, fearing it would cast a shadow over their legal one. When Jughashvili wrote a critique of Kvali’s seeming docility and inaction, Jordania and the editors refused to publish it. Word got back to Jibladze and Jordania that Jughashvili was agitating against Kvali behind their backs.86 But whatever the bad personal blood, a genuine difference in tactics was at stake: the future Stalin, in sync with Lado, insisted that the Marxist movement shift from educational work to direct action. Lado showed the way by organizing a strike of the city’s horse-drawn tram drivers for January 1, 1900. The drivers, for their thirteen-hour workday, earned 90 kopecks, part of which was taken back in dubious workplace “fines.” Their walkout briefly brought the capital to a halt, and forced a wage increase. That was power. There were risks, however, as Jordania and Jibladze had noted. One of the tram workers informed on Lado and in mid-January 1900 he barely escaped the Tiflis gendarmes, fleeing to Baku.87 That same month, Jughashvili was arrested—for the first time. He had just turned twenty-one, legal age, a few weeks before.

The nominal charge was that his father, Beso, owed back taxes in Didi Lilo, the village Beso had left more than three decades earlier without, however, formally exiting the village rolls. Jughashvili was incarcerated in the Metekhi Prison fortress—the one on the cliff that he had walked past at age eleven on his way to work with his father at the Adelkhanov Tannery. Mikho Davitashvili and other friends seem to have assembled the money and paid off Beso’s outstanding village debt, so Jughashvili was released. Keke arrived from Gori and, for a time, insisted on staying with him in his room at the observatory—this had to be embarrassing. She “lived in permanent anxiety over her son,” recalled a neighbor and distant relative (Maria Kitiashvili). “I remember well how she would come over to our place and cry about her dear Soso—Where is he now, did the gendarmes arrest him?”88 Soon, Keke herself would be monitored by the police and occasionally summoned for questioning. It remains unclear why the gendarmes did not arrest Beso, who was living in Tiflis (Iosif received handmade boots from his father on occasion).89 Nor is it clear why Jughashvili was not arrested for his own debt to the state from the seminary scholarship. Police incompetence cannot be ruled out. But the arrest for Beso’s debt does seem like a pretext, a warning to a young radical or perhaps a maneuver to mark him: Jughashvili was photographed for the police archive. He returned to his job at the observatory, but also continued his illegal political lectures and remained under surveillance. “According to agent information, Jughashvili is a Social Democrat and conducts meetings with workers,” the police noted. “Surveillance has established that he behaves in a highly cautious manner, always looking back while walking.”90

UNDERGROUND

Amid the cock fighting, banditry, and prostitution (political and sexual) in the Caucasus, illegal socialist agitation hardly stood out, at least initially. As late as 1900, the overwhelming preponderance of Tiflis inhabitants under police surveillance were Armenians, who were watched for fear they maintained links to their coethnics across the border in the Ottoman empire. But just a few years later, most of the police dossiers on “political” suspects were of Georgians and Social Democrats—238 of them, including Jughashvili’s.91 On March 21, 1901, the police raided the Tiflis Observatory premises. Although Jughashvili was absent when the search of his and other employees’ possessions took place, he may have been observing from not far away, been spotted and had his person searched, too.92 If so, the police did not arrest him, perhaps because they wanted to keep him under further surveillance, to uncover others. Be that as it may, the future Stalin’s meteorological career was over. He went underground, permanently.

Jughashvili now had no means of support, other than being paid for some private tutoring and sponging off colleagues, girlfriends, and the proletarians he sought to lead. He threw himself into conspiratorial activities, like establishing safe houses and opening illegal presses to help strikes and May Day marches. May Day had been established as a holiday by socialists around the world in order to commemorate the Haymarket riots in Chicago in 1886, when police had fired on strikers who sought an eight-hour workday. In Tiflis, May Day marches with red flags had been initiated in 1898 by railway workers. Held outside the city proper, the first three marches drew 25 people (1898), 75 (1899), then 400 (1900). For May Day 1901, Jughashvili was involved in plans for a bold, risky march right down Golovin Prospect, in the heart of Tiflis. He agitated among the city’s largest concentration of workers, the Tiflis Main Railway Shops. The tsarist police made preemptive arrests and arrayed mounted Cossacks with sabers and long whips, but at least 2,000 workers and onlookers defied them, chanting “Down with autocracy!” After a forty-five-minute melee involving hand-to-hand combat, the streets of the Caucasus capital were soaked with blood.93

Russian Social Democrats were exiled for revolutionary activity by the tsarist police to the Caucasus—where, of course, they helped foment revolutionary activity—and Jughashvili met Mikhail Kalinin, among others.94 But the twenty-six-year-old militant Ketskhoveli remained a key link to the imperial Russian Social Democrats and a role model for Jughashvili. Underground in Baku, Lado did start up a Georgian-language competitor to Kvali, christened Brdzola (the Struggle), a rowdy broadsheet that began appearing in September 1901. Referring to the bloody 1901 May Day clash in Tiflis, an (unsigned) essay in Brdzola (November-December 1901) defiantly rationalized that “the sacrifices we make today in street demonstration will be compensated a hundredfold,” adding that “every militant who falls in the struggle or is torn from our ranks [by arrest] rouses hundreds of new fighters.”95 The illegal printing press, which Ketskhoveli established along with Avel Yenukidze, Leonid Krasin, and other Social Democrats in Baku, was hidden in the city’s Muslim quarter and code-named “Nina”—Russian for Nino (the female patron saint of Georgia). It also published reprints of the recently founded Russian-language Marxist emigre newspaper Iskra, original copies of which were smuggled from Central Europe to Baku via Tabriz (Iran) on horseback.96 Nina very soon became the largest underground Social Democrat printing press in the entire Russian empire, and would confound the tsarist police (from 1901 to 1907).97 It was through the Nina printing press, as well as Lado’s Brdzola, that the young Jughashvili became acquainted with the ideas of Lenin, who wrote many of the blistering (unsigned) editorials in the thirteen issues of Iskra that had appeared by the end of 1901.98

Ketskhoveli, obviating Jordania, afforded Jughashvili direct access to the pulse of Russian Social Democracy, helping him become an informed Marxist and militant street agitator. The latter persona was grafted onto Jughashvili’s already deep-set autodidact disposition and his heartfelt vocation to enlighten the masses. From personal experience, however, Jughashvili would lament that workers often did not appreciate the importance of studying and self-improvement. During a meeting on November 11, 1901, of the newly formed Tiflis Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, he championed not the worker members but the demi-intelligentsia members—that is, types like himself and Lado. He argued that inviting workers to join the party was incompatible with “conspiracy” and would expose members to arrest. Lenin had propagated this vision in the pages of Iskra. He also wrote a wide-ranging pamphlet What Is to Be Done? (March 1902), a self-defense against a slashing attack (in September 1901) by other Marxists in the Iskra group. Lenin’s advocacy for an intelligentsia-centric party would soon come to divide the Iskra group.99 At the November 1901 Tiflis Committee meeting, meanwhile, a majority of Caucasus Social Democrats voted to admit workers to the party, against Jughashvili’s Lenin-like urgings.100 At the same time, the Tiflis Committee decided to send Jughashvili to agitate among workers in the Black Sea port of Batum.101

Batum was a high-profile assignment. Just twelve miles from the Ottoman border, the port had been seized from the Ottomans with the rest of Islamic Adjara (Ajaria) in the 1877–78 war and, after being joined to Russia’s Transcaucasus Railway, became the terminal for exporting Russia’s Caspian Sea oil. The world’s longest pipeline from Baku to Batum was under construction (it would open in 1907) and its sponsors—the Swedish Nobel brothers of dynamite fame, the French Rothschild brothers of banking fame, and the Armenian magnate Alexander Mantashyan (b. 1842), known in Russified form as Mantashov—endeavored to break U.S. Standard Oil’s near-monopoly in supplying kerosene to Europe.102 Jughashvili, too, sought to ride the oil boom, for leftist purposes. (Soon Iskra, along with other Russian Marxist literature, began arriving there by boat from Marseilles.) The port city already had “Sunday Schools” for workers, established by Nikoloz “Karlo” Chkheidze (b. 1864), one of the founders of the Third Group, and Isidor Ramishvili (b. 1859), both close comrades of Noe Jordania.

The younger Jughashvili immersed himself in the workers’ milieu, where he “spoke without an orator’s refinement,” a hostile fellow Georgian later recalled. “His words were imbued with power, determination. He spoke with sarcasm, irony, hammering away with crude severities,” but then “apologized, explaining that he was speaking the language of the proletariat who were not taught subtle manners or aristocratic eloquence.”103 Jughashvili’s worker pose became real when an acquaintance got him hired at the Rothschild oil company. There, on February 25, 1902, amid slackening customer demand, 389 workers (of around 900) were let go with just two weeks’ notice, provoking a total walkout two days later.104 Mass arrests ensued. Secretly, the Caucasus military chief confided to the local governors that Social Democrat “propaganda” was finding “receptive soil” because of the workers’ dreadful living and laboring conditions.105 Moreover, the policy of deporting protesting workers to their native villages was only magnifying the rebellious waves in the Georgian countryside.106 On March 9, a crowd carrying cobblestones sought to free comrades at the transit prison awaiting deportation. “Brothers, don’t be afraid,” one imprisoned worker shouted, “they can’t shoot, for God’s sake free us.” The police opened fire, killing at least fourteen.107

The “Batum massacre” reverberated around the Russian empire, but for Jughashvili—who had distributed incendiary leaflets—it brought arrest on April 5, 1901. A police report characterized him as “of no specific occupation and unknown residence,” but “a teacher of the workers.”108 Whether Jughashvili had any influence on worker militancy is unclear. But he was charged with “incitement to disorder and insubordination against higher authority.”109 Batum also set in motion the profound bad blood that would haunt Jughashvili in Caucasus Social Democrat circles. To replace him there, the Tiflis Committee sent David “Mokheve” Khartishvili. Back in Tiflis, Mokheve had argued that only workers ought to be full members of the Tiflis Committee, denying such status to intelligentsia (like Jughashvili). Once in Batum, Mokheve accused the imprisoned Jughashvili of having deliberately provoked the police massacre.110 While Jughashvili was in prison, however, his Batum loyalists resisted Mokheve’s authority. A police report—drawn from informants—observed that “Jughashvili’s despotism has enraged many people and the organization has split.”111 It was during this imprisonment that Jughashvili began regularly using the pseudonym Koba, “avenger of injustice.”112 Members of the Tiflis Committee got angry at him. They would likely have been even angrier had they known that while wallowing for a year in the Batum remand prison in 1902–3, the future Stalin twice begged the Caucasus governor-general for release, citing “a worsening, choking cough and the helpless position of my elderly mother, abandoned by her husband twelve years ago and seeing me as her sole support in life.”113 (Keke also petitioned the governor-general for her son in January 1903.) Such groveling, if it were to become known, could have tainted a revolutionary’s reputation. A prison doctor examined Jughashvili, but the gendarmerie opposed clemency.114 Fifteen months after his arrest, in July 1903, Koba Jughashvili was sentenced by administrative fiat to three years’ exile in the Mongol-speaking Buryat lands of Eastern Siberia.

Outside the bars of his cattle car, in November 1903, the future Stalin likely saw real winter for the first time—snow-blanketed earth, completely iced rivers. As a Georgian in Siberia, Koba the avenger nearly froze to death on his first escape attempt. But already by January 1904 he had managed to elude the village police chief, make it forty miles to the railhead, and arrive illegally all the way back in Tiflis.115 He would tell three different stories about his escape, including one about hitching a ride with a deliveryman whom he plied with vodka. In fact, the future Stalin appears to have used a real or forged gendarmerie identity card—a trick that compounded the suspicions about his quick escape. (Was he a police collaborator?)116 During his absence from Tiflis, there had been a congress to unify the South Caucasus Social Democrats and create a “union committee” of nine members; Jughashvili would be added to it.117 Even so, his former Batum committee shunned him. He was associated with the police bloodbath and political split there, and after his quick return, he was distrusted as a possible agent provocateur.118 Wanted by the police, he roamed: back to Gori (where he got new false papers), then Batum and Tiflis. His sometime landlady and mistress in the Batum underground, Natasha Kirtava-Sikharulidze, then twenty-two, had refused to accompany him to Tiflis; he cursed her.119 Police surveillance in the Caucasus capital was intense and Jughashvili changed residences at least eight times in a month. He met up again with Lev Rozenfeld, better known as Kamenev, who helped him find a hideaway. One safe-house apartment belonged to Sergei Alliluyev, a skilled machinist who had been sent to Tiflis, hired on at the railway workshops, and married. The family home of the Alliluyevs (Stalin’s future second father-in-law) in the Tiflis outskirts became a Social Democrat meeting center, providing refuge for agitators who, for a time, escaped arrest and deportation.120

Kamenev would also give Jughashvili a copy of the Russian translation of Machiavelli’s The Prince (1869), although Russia’s revolutionaries hardly needed the Italian political theorist.121 Sergei Nechayev (1847–82), the son of a serf and the founder of the secret society the People’s Retaliation, had observed in 1871, “Everything that allows the triumph of the revolution is moral, and everything that stands in its way is immoral.”122

• • •

SUCH WERE THE LADO-INSPIRED early revolutionary years (1898–1903) in the life of the future dictator—a vocation as an agitator and teacher of the workers; a bloody confrontational May Day strategy in Tiflis; an illegal Marxist press as a rival to a legal one; accusations of provoking a police massacre and splitting the party in Batum; a long, rough prison stint in western Georgia; privately groveling before the Caucasus governor-general; a brief, freezing Siberian exile; suspicions of police collaboration; a life on the run. Almost in the blink of an eye, a pious boy from Gori, Jughashvili had gone from smuggling Victor Hugo into the Tiflis seminary to becoming a participant—albeit a completely obscure one—in a global socialist movement. That was largely thanks not to some Caucasus outlaw culture, but to tsarist Russia’s profound injustices and repression. Open confrontation with the regime had been willfully pursued by young hotheads who imagined they were plumbing the depths of the autocracy’s intransigence. Soon, however, this combative, risky approach would be adopted even by those Marxist socialists who had long resisted it, men such as Jordania and Jibladze of Kvali. The tsarist political system and conditions in the empire promoted militancy. In the Caucasus, as in the empire as a whole, leftists essentially leaped the stage of agitating for trade unionism—which remained illegal in Russia far later than in Western Europe—and went straight to violent overthrow of the abusive order.123

Even officialdom showed awareness (in internal correspondence) of the strong impetus to revolt: the factory regime was beyond brutal; landowners and their enforcers treated postemancipation peasants as chattel; any attempt to alleviate such conditions was treated as treason.124 “First one becomes convinced that existing conditions are wrong and unjust,” Stalin would later explain, persuasively. “Then one resolves to do the best one can to remedy them. Under the tsar’s regime, any attempt genuinely to help the people put one outside the pale of the law; one found oneself hunted and hounded as a revolutionist.”125 If living under tsarism made him, like many other young people, a street-fighting revolutionary, Jughashvili also styled himself an enlightener—so far, almost exclusively in oral form—as well as an outsider and an underdog, an up-and-comer who bucked not only the tsarist police but also the uncomprehending revolutionary establishment under Jordania.126 In seeking to lead protesting workers, Jughashvili had mixed success. Still, he did prove adept at cultivating a tight-knit group of young men like himself. “Koba distinguished himself from all other Bolsheviks,” one hostile Georgian emigre recalled, “by his unquestionably greater energy, indefatigable capacity for hard work, unconquerable lust for power, and above all his enormous, particularistic organizational talent” aimed at forging “disciples through whom he could . . . hold the whole organization in his grasp.”127

Before Jughashvili was launched on his own, however, Lado Ketskhoveli exemplified for him the daring professional revolutionary—battling injustice, living underground off his wits, defying tsarist police.128 Leonid Krasin judged Lado an organizational genius. Sergei Alliluyev would deem Lado the most magnetic personality of the Caucasus socialist movement. But in spring 1902, Brdzola had ceased publication after just four issues, following extensive arrests of the Baku Social Democrats. (Its rival Kvali would soon be shuttered as well.) In September 1902, Ketskhoveli himself had been arrested and incarcerated in Tiflis’ Metekhi Prison fortress. Distraught over the arrests of his comrades, Lado may have precipitated his own arrest by giving his real name during a police search of someone else’s apartment. Standing by the extralarge cell embrasures and shouting out to fellow inmates and passersby, Lado, “a rebel [buntar],” “feared and hated” by the prison administration, appears to have baited the prison guards daily. A note he tried to smuggle out of Metekhi may have gotten Avel Yenukidze arrested. In August 1903, when Lado refused to stand down from the window, a prison guard, after a warning, shot and killed Lado, age twenty-seven, through the outside window of his locked cell.129 The story would be told that Lado had been defiantly shouting “Down with the autocracy!” He seems to have been willing, perhaps even eager, to die for the cause.

Later, Stalin would not erase Lado’s independent revolutionary exploits or existence, even as almost everyone else connected to the dictator at one time or another would be airbrushed.130 (Lado’s birth house would be included in newsreels featuring Soviet Georgia.)131 The earliness of Lado’s martyrdom certainly helped in this regard. But that circumstance highlights the fact that Iosif Jughashvili himself could have suffered the same fate as his first mentor: early death in a tsarist prison.