Gori had no large enterprises; its economy was dominated by handicrafts and trade. Onions, garlic, cucumbers, sweet peppers, cabbages, radishes, potatoes and aubergines grew in a perfect climate, and the Atenuri wine produced from the Ateni grape was highly appreciated. The sheep and cattle kept on the little hillside farms were famous for their succulence. In Gori itself there was a flourishing commerce in leather and wool, and craftsmen made shoes, coats and carpets. Shops and stalls were everywhere. Most of the owners were tailors, cobblers and carpenters. Professional employment was mainly confined to the priests and teachers. Policemen kept order. There were several taverns where men took solace in the bottle. It was a scene that had changed little since the Russians had entered Georgia at the request of its various rulers from the late eighteenth century. Yet even Gori was changing. In 1871 it acquired a railway station down by the River Mtkvari. The trains enabled passengers to get to Tbilisi in two or three hours. Commercial and industrial penetration of the area was just a matter of time.
Georgians like the Dzhughashvilis dressed plainly. Women wore long black skirts and, when they were in church, they donned head-scarves. The priests had black cassocks. The other men were no more colourful. Black jackets, shirts and trousers were customary and there was no pressure on working-class males to look smart. Men expected to rule their households with their wives’ complete obedience — and Besarion was notorious for his bad temper and violence. Women carried out all the domestic chores, including the cooking. This was one of the glories of old Georgia, whose cuisine was a stunning combination of the tastes of the eastern Mediterranean and the Caucasus. Outstanding dishes included sturgeon in pomegranate sauce, spicy pork kebabs and aubergines with walnut paste. The basic salads were also excellent. The Kutaisi combination of tomatoes, onions, coriander and ground walnuts was a meal in itself. But poor families, even if they retained links with the countryside, would rarely have the opportunity to eat such a diet in full. In fact people like the Dzhughashvilis would subsist mainly on beans and bread. Life for most inhabitants of Gori was hard and there was little prospect of betterment.
Besarion married nineteen-year-old Ketevan Geladze on 17 May 1874. Her father had died when she was young and she and her mother had had to get by as best they could in the little village of Gambareuli.6 Ketevan — known to family and acquaintances as Keke — quickly became pregnant. In fact she had two sons before Joseph’s arrival. The first was Mikhail, who died when only one year old. Then came Giorgi, but he too died young. Joseph alone survived early childhood. Taken to church on 17 December 1878, he was baptised by archpriest Khakhanov and catechist Kvinikadze.7
Christened Joseph, he was known to everyone by the diminutive Soso. Little else — in fact nothing at all — is known about the very earliest years of his life. It might have been expected that Joseph’s mother and father, having suffered the loss of two sons in infancy, would have treated their third with special care and affection. This would also have been in keeping with the Georgian tradition to dote on a new baby in the family. The Georgians are more like the Italians and Greeks than the peoples of northern Europe in child rearing. Besarion Dzhughashvili was an exception because he never showed his son any kindliness. Keke tried to make up for this. Though a strict and demanding mother, she made him feel special and dressed him as well as her finances allowed. Besarion resented this. Keke set her heart on Joseph becoming educated and entering the priesthood whereas Besarion wanted him to be a cobbler like himself. Almost from the beginning the Dzhughashvilis had an unhappy relationship; and far from alleviating the situation, Joseph’s arrival exacerbated the tension between them.
Besarion had a temperament that often flared up into angry violence against his wife. His commercial ambitions did not meet with success. His cobbler’s shop failed to move with the times by producing the European-style shoes — rather than traditional Georgian footwear — which were becoming the popular norm.8 Whatever he tried always ended in failure, and his lack of success as an independent artisan and his loss of local esteem probably aggravated his tendency to volcanic outbursts. His drinking got out of control. He spent more time guzzling wine at Yakob Egnatashvili’s tavern than tending to his family obligations.9
Keke according to most accounts was a devout woman. She attended church, consulted priests and was eager for her son to become one of them. But there were rumours which placed her in a different light. Sergo Beria, son of Stalin’s police chief from 1938, wrote that his grandmother — who befriended Keke in old age — told of a loose-living woman with a line in smutty talk: ‘When I was young I cleaned house for people and when I came upon a good-looking boy I didn’t waste the opportunity.’ When Besarion could not supply money for the family’s needs, Keke allegedly went out and sold her body.10 A less extreme version was that, although she was not serially promiscuous, she had an affair with one of Gori’s prominent personalities. The usual candidates were tavern keeper Yakob Egnatashvili and local police chief Damian Davrishevi.11 As is not unusual in such a situation, proof is lacking; but circumstantial evidence filled the gap for the gossip-mongers. When Stalin attained supreme power, he promoted the sons of Egnatashvili to high rank and this is sometimes taken as a sign of special kinship with them.12
Soso’s paternity was also sometimes ascribed to Damian Davrishevi. Damian’s son Joseph, a childhood friend of Joseph Dzhughashvili, could not help noticing their physical likeness; and in later life Joseph Davrishevi did not exclude the possibility that they were half-brothers.13 Enquiries were made in the late 1950s in order to gather damning evidence on Stalin; and the authorities were not averse to discovering whether the image of Keke as a God-fearing, simple peasant woman was a myth. If mud could be thrown at his mother, some of it would land on him. But nothing of the kind was found.
Yet if rumours of this kind were rife during Stalin’s childhood, they can hardly have calmed Besarion’s troubled mind. They may well have been the fundamental motive behind his descent into drunkenness, hooliganism and domestic violence. Known as Mad Beso, he got into scrapes as his business went into decline. He was going to the bad, and Keke took what solace she could in the local church. She also eked out a living by working as a cleaner and seamstress: she was determined that the family should not be dragged down by her bad-tempered, incompetent husband. Beso himself saw that there was no commercial future for him in Gori. Like other artisans, he sought work in the growing industrial sector in Tbilisi. There he became employed as a labourer in Emile Adelkhanov’s large shoe factory in 1884. The hours were long, the pay low. Beso continued to drink heavily and there is no sign that he remitted much money home to Keke. His visits to Gori brought wife and son no solace: drunkenness and violence were all they could expect from the wastrel. The more he degenerated, the more Keke took emotional and spiritual refuge within the walls of the parish church.