Back in Gori, Joseph resumed the life of church, school and the streets. It was an eventful period. While standing outside church one day, Joseph was knocked down by a phaeton. This was a horse-drawn trap, typically with two or three seats for its occupants, primitive suspension-hoops and a simple set of shafts. Open to the air, it was one of the cheapest forms of carriage. The driver that day in Gori lost control of his horse. The phaeton careered towards the crowd by the church wall and young Joseph Dzhughashvili did not move out of the way in time. It could have been a fatal accident.8
Although the boy’s left arm and his legs were badly damaged, he quickly recovered.9 Soon he was attending school again. The physical harm, however, was permanent. Joseph’s arm was left shortened and lacking in flexibility. It was to be the reason why he was not called up into the Imperial Army in 1916–17. Thus an unruly horse, by trampling the Gori youngster, was instrumental in saving him from potential annihilation in the Great War. The accident made him ungainly and apparently embarrassed about his appearance. Another point of psychological stress was added to the list. Nor did the injury enhance his prowess in the trials of strengths among the boys of the town. But he was determined to prove himself. Schoolmate Joseph Iremashvili recalled how young Dzhughashvili continued to use dirty methods to win his wrestling bouts.10 Nothing satisfied him except the leading position. He could not abide his friend David Machavariani heading their street gang. Sometimes he went off and joined another gang rather than accept orders from Machavariani. It was this kind of behaviour that led him to become known for his ‘bad character’.
When this got him nowhere, he accepted David Machavariani’s leadership. Like everyone else, he had to pass a series of initiation tests in order to join the gang. Would-be members needed to prove their mettle by going for a long run, carrying out an act of theft and submitting to be beaten with a strap. Others in the gang were Peter Kapanadze and Joseph Davrishevi.11 Young Dzhughashvili never forgot these days and was to keep in touch with Peter when they were old men.12 These friends remembered Joseph as rather gawky. He never mastered Georgia’s traditional dances. The lekuri (which was known in Russia as the lezginka) remained beyond his powers. There was competition among the town boys to perform it well. When another fellow did it better, Joseph moved over to his rival and deadlegged him.
His mother started working as a seamstress at the Davrishevis, and Joseph Dzhughashvili began to see a lot of Joseph Davrishevi. Some days they climbed up to the fortress above the town to see the birds living in the walls. But they did not always get on well. Joseph Dzhughashvili was not averse to stealing his friend’s food. When a dispute broke out, Davrishevi’s father came out and gave them another dish. Dzhughashvili justified his misdemeanour by telling his friend that it had ensured that they should receive double the normal amount.13 Sometimes, though, he pushed his luck too hard. Keen to show how tough he was, he challenged stronger boys to fight. Downed ten times in a tussle with a lad from another gang, he was badly beaten up. His mother fetched him home and complained to police chief Davrishevi, but he replied: ‘When an earthenware pot clashes with an iron pot, it’s the earthenware pot which gets cracked and not the iron one.’14
Joseph’s misdemeanours were not confined to his fights with other boys. The bright student at school was a scamp on the streets. Among his victims was a mentally deficient woman called Magdalena. His partner in crime was young Davrishevi. Magdalena possessed a Persian cat, and the two lads teased her by tying a pan to its tail. On her name day they crept into her kitchen while she was at church and stole an enormous cake.15 The affair was resolved without undue fuss but Davrishevi, who could hardly claim innocence, concluded that it showed that Joseph Dzhughashvili was a queer and nasty piece of work from the beginning. Another boyhood memoirist, Joseph Iremashvili, came to the same opinion. Both Davrishevi and Iremashvili imputed primary responsibility to their friend. By the same token they asserted that Dzhughashvili had a leading role even if he never achieved his goal of gang leadership. Young Dzhughashvili was cantankerous, volatile and ambitious; he was also frustrated: he never supplanted David Machavariani in the gang. But apparently this was not a situation he accepted. He resented it. He had talent and wanted others to recognise it. He was reluctant to bide his time. Others ought to show him greater respect than he currently received.
There was also a wider aspect to his character’s formation. He was brought up near the mountains of Georgia where traditions of blood feud persisted, and it has been suggested that his propensity for violence, conspiracy and revenge sprang from this culture. There is an obvious difficulty here. Most Georgians entering educational institutions in the late Imperial period tended to accommodate themselves to a less traditional worldview. If indeed the culture of the mountainside was an influence upon him, Joseph was peculiar in failing to evolve away from it. Not all Georgians were obsessively vengeful. The customary stress on compensation for injury did not have to involve the principle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Negotiations between the perpetrator and the victim of hurt — or their relatives — were another way of dealing with the problem. There was something quite extraordinary about Joseph’s vindictiveness. As he grew up, he was notorious for this characteristic: he enjoyed crushing his rivals — it was never enough simply to defeat them. Georgian popular culture had a broad emphasis on honour. This involved loyalty to family, friends and clients. Joseph by contrast felt no lasting obligation to anybody. He was later to execute in-laws, veteran fellow leaders and whole groups of communists whose patron he had been. On the surface he was a good Georgian. He never ceased to revere the poetry he loved as a youth. He hosted lavish dinner parties after the Caucasian manner once he was in power. He liked to carouse; he dandled children on his knee. But his sense of traditional honour was non-existent. If he retained a number of attitudes and customs from his childhood, there were many which he abandoned. The history of the twentieth century would have been a lot less bloody if Joseph Dzhughashvili had been a better Georgian.
Not only popular culture but also Georgian literature had an influence on him. He loved the national classics, especially the thirteenth-century epic poetry of Shota Rustaveli (who was revered by Georgians as their Dante).16 Another favourite was Alexander Qazbegi’s story The Patricide, which had been published to much acclaim in 1883: Joseph loved it. The main character was called Koba. The plot involved episodes from the history of the great resistance led by Shamil against Russian Imperial power in the 1840s. Koba was an abrek. The term implies not just a robber but a man of the mountains with fearless hostility to all authority. Abreks live by their cunning as well as violence but do not prey upon ordinary people. Their code of honour allows and encourages them to be ruthless. What they punish is treachery. They do not expect life to be easy or God to rescue them from misfortune; and The Patricide suggested that betrayal by friends and acquaintances is something only to be expected. But revenge is sweet; the abreks will always pursue to the death those who have wronged them. Koba declares: ‘I’ll make their mothers weep!’