In Stalin’s worldview, the state the Bolsheviks created was an absolute. All existence was completely and unconditionally subordinate to the state, and its highest personification was the party and its leader. Personal interests were recognized only to the extent that they served the state, which had the unquestioned right to demand from people any sacrifice, including their lives. The state was unrestricted in its actions and could never be wrong, as it represented the ultimate truth of historical progress. Any action by the regime could be justified by the greatness of its mission. Mistakes and crimes by the state did not exist; there was only historical necessity and inevitability or, in some cases, the growing pains of building a new society.
The primary tool used to compel submission to the state and suppress the individual and the social was the so-called “class war” against foreign and domestic “enemies.” In this war, Stalin was the foremost theoretician and a ruthless tactician. With the successful advance of socialism, he asserted, the class war would only intensify. This idea was a cornerstone of his dictatorship. As a means of interpreting reality, the class war theory was also a powerful propaganda tool. Inadequate political and economic outcomes, the hardships endured by the populace, and military failures could all be explained by the underhanded scheming of “enemies.” As a method of state repression, class war gave the Terror the breadth and brutality of an actual war. The Soviet dictator has earned the distinction of being the organizer and director of one of the most powerful and merciless terror machines known to history.
Stalin had no trouble reconciling Marxist and Bolshevik-Leninist dogma with great-power imperialism. In November 1937, he told his associates the following: “The Russian tsars did many bad things. They plundered and enslaved the people. They waged wars and grabbed territory in the interests of the landowners. But they did do one good thing—they created a huge state that stretches all the way to Kamchatka. We have inherited that state. And for the first time we, the Bolsheviks, have brought together and consolidated this state as a single, indivisible state … for the benefit of the workers.”26 These candid words are all the more telling as they were spoken at a dinner celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution, the country’s main revolutionary holiday. In the international arena, Stalin’s expansion of the empire makes him a worthy heir to the Russian tsars. Only the ideological façade was different. At the Berlin train station on the eve of the Potsdam Conference in 1945, U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Averell Harriman asked Stalin how it felt to arrive in the capital of a defeated enemy as a victor. Stalin replied, “Tsar Alexander made it all the way to Paris.”27 Yet Stalin arguably outdid the tsars. The Soviet empire expanded its sphere of influence to encompass huge swaths of Europe and Asia and transformed itself into one of the world’s two superpowers.
Did Stalin look back on his triumphs after parting with his guests for the last time in his life on 28 February? Did his thoughts take him to earlier times—his childhood, youth, the revolution? Like the lives of his fellow revolutionaries, Stalin’s life was cleanly divided into two parts: before and after the revolution. Conceptually and chronologically, these two periods were approximate halves of his life. The first thirty-eight of his seventy-four years were lived before the revolution, and twenty of them were spent actively working toward it.
1 BEFORE THE REVOLUTION
According to his official Soviet biography, Stalin was born in 1879. In fact Ioseb Jughashvili (his birth name) was born one year earlier. Stalin knew, of course, when and where he was born: in the small Georgian town of Gori, in a far corner of the vast Russian Empire. A Gori church register (part of Stalin’s personal archive) provides the exact date: 6 December 1878. This date can also be found in other documents, such as his graduation certificate from the Gori Theological School. In a form filled out in 1920, his year of birth is again given as 1878. But the year 1879 began to appear in paperwork completed by his various helpers, and that date was used in all encyclopedias and reference materials. After he had consolidated power, a grand celebration was held in honor of his fiftieth birthday on 21 December 1929. There was confusion over not only the year of his birth, but also the day, given as 9 December (Old Style) instead of 6 December. This inaccuracy came to the attention of historians only in 1990.1 The reason for it has yet to be determined. One thing is clear: in the 1920s, Stalin decided to become one year younger. And he did.
Legends surround Stalin’s parentage. Sensation seekers proclaimed Ioseb (who later became Iosif once his interactions began to be primarily in Russian) to have been the illegitimate son of a prosperous merchant, a factory owner, a prince, and even Emperor Alexander III, who supposedly was attended to by Ioseb’s mother while the emperor was visiting Tiflis. The historical record suggests more prosaic origins. Ioseb was born into a humble Georgian family. His mother, Ekaterine or Keke (Yekaterina in Russian) Geladze, the daughter of serfs, was born in 1856. In 1864, after the abolition of serfdom, her family moved to Gori, where, at the age of eighteen, she was given in marriage to the cobbler Besarion or Beso (Vissarion in Russian) Jughashvili, six years her senior. Their first two children died in infancy; Ioseb (Soso) was the third.2
Few pieces of documentary evidence survive from Stalin’s youth. The primary source of our knowledge is memoirs written after he had already attained the pinnacle of power. Even an uncritical reader will notice that these memoirists are writing about the childhood and youth of a future dictator, not the early years of Ioseb Jughashvili. This aberration magnifies the tendency, common to biographies generally, toward selective exaggeration and exclusion. Depending on the situation and the writer’s politics, emphasis is placed on either Ioseb’s virtues and leadership qualities or his innate cruelty and psychological abnormalities. But as Ronald Grigor Suny has shown, attempts to find the future dictator in the child Ioseb Jughashvili are highly suspect.
It is commonly believed that Ioseb had a difficult childhood. Abuse and beatings by his drunkard father, as well as material deprivation, supposedly embittered the boy and made him ruthless and vindictive. But there is plenty of evidence to support a very different picture. By many measures, Stalin’s childhood was ordinary or even comfortable. A number of accounts attest that his father was not only a skilled cobbler, but also that he was able to read Georgian and converse in several languages, including Russian. His mother had received some home schooling and could also read and write in Georgian. Given the low literacy rate in Georgia at the time, this would have given the family an advantage. During Ioseb’s early years, Besarion Jughashvili apparently was quite successful and his family was well provided for.3
Later, after Besarion began to drink heavily and then abandoned his wife and child, responsibility for Ioseb’s upbringing fell on his mother’s shoulders. Ekaterine was a woman of strong character and a hard worker, and, starting with odd jobs, she managed to learn the craft of dressmaking. As an only child (a circumstance that would prove significant), Soso, unlike many of his peers, did not have to work and could therefore attend school. In a letter written in 1950, requesting a meeting for old times’ sake, one of Stalin’s childhood friends commented, “In 1894, when you graduated from the theological school, I graduated from the Gori Municipal School. You were accepted that same year into the Tbilisi Theological Seminary, but I wasn’t able to continue my studies since my father had 8 children, so we were poor and we helped him.”4 Ioseb’s mother, dreaming that her son would climb the social ladder to become a priest, doggedly worked to make this dream a reality and did everything she could to facilitate his education. Such strivings are hard to reconcile with the idea of a bleak, impoverished childhood.