Their limitations notwithstanding, the thirteen published volumes of Stalin’s Sochineniya were destined to become the single most important source for his biography – ‘fundamental’ to ‘the study of the man and his age’, as McNeal put it.57 They have been particularly important for those biographers who see Stalin as he saw himself – primarily a political activist and theorist, whose driving force was his unstinting commitment to the communist ideology that shaped his personality as well as his behaviour. But not everyone agrees that politics is the Stalin biographers’ stone.
CHAPTER 3
READING, WRITING AND REVOLUTION
Among the best-known stories about Stalin’s childhood is that he was beaten and brutalised by his drunken father, Vissarion Dzhugashvili (Beso). The source of this story is Joseph Iremashvili, a Georgian childhood friend of Stalin’s. Like Stalin, Iremashvili became a member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, but he was allied with the Mensheviks, the opponents of Lenin’s (and Stalin’s) Bolshevik faction. By the time the memoir was published in 1932, he was living in exile in Germany. According to Iremashvili, ‘undeserved beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as his father himself. Since all men who had authority over others either through power or age reminded him of his father there soon arose a feeling of revenge against all men who stood above him.’1
Another boyhood friend of Stalin’s, Soso Davrishev, who had emigrated to France, also recalled that Beso beat his son, but his memoir was not published until many years after Iremashvili’s. Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, recalled he’d told her that as a child he was beaten by his mother. Svetlana repeated this claim in a second memoir but also highlighted Beso’s violent behaviour:
Fights, crudeness were not a rare phenomenon in this poor, semi-literate family where the head of the family drank. The mother beat the little boy, the husband beat her. But the boy loved his mother and defended her, once he threw a knife at his father [who] then chased him.2
Based on these reports, innumerable pathological theories of Stalin’s personality have been constructed. The most extreme is Roman Brackman’s, who speculates it was Stalin’s patricide that started him down the path of a mass-murderous political life. But medical records show Beso was not murdered but died in hospital of TB, colitis and chronic pneumonia in 1909 – the year of death stated by Stalin in the personal questionnaire for ROSTA that he completed in 1920.
Brackman is also a leading exponent of another conspiracy theory: that Stalin was, in fact, an agent of the Okhrana, the Tsarist security police. The point of departure for this hypothesis is the so-called ‘Eremin letter’ of July 1913, in which a Tsarist police colonel of that name recorded that Stalin was one of his agents. The source of the document, published in English by Life magazine in 1956, was Alexander Orlov, an officer in Stalin’s security police who defected to the west in the 1930s. While Brackman, like most scholars, accepted that the Eremin letter was an obvious forgery, he argued that the document was, in fact, manufactured by Stalin himself as a means of discrediting the idea that he actually was a police agent. For Brackman, the Great Terror of the 1930s is above all a cover-up operation by Stalin, designed to kill anyone who had knowledge of his past treachery. All the evidence he adduces in support of this hypothesis is circumstantial and speculative but for Brackman the absence of direct evidence is in itself proof of cover-up and conspiracy.3
More credible, but no less speculative, is Robert Tucker’s synthesis of political biography and insights gleaned from the German psychoanalyst Karen Horney’s analysis of the neurotic personality. According to Tucker, Stalin was a neurotic who responded to childhood trauma by creating an idealised image of himself. Far from being merely a political device to manipulate and mobilise the masses, the Stalin personality cult reflected ‘Stalin’s own monstrously inflated vision of himself as the greatest genius of Russian and world history’. Stalin’s lust for power and the purging of his political enemies was psychodynamic and reflected the striving for the fame and glory that would match his exalted self-image.
Tucker formulated this hypothesis in the early 1950s while serving as a diplomat in the US embassy in Moscow. As he admitted himself, there was no direct evidence to support his theory and the prevailing wisdom among his then colleagues was that neither Stalin nor other Soviet leaders took the personality cult too seriously. But Tucker took heart from Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the 20th party congress. Included in Khrushchev’s indictment was, to use Tucker’s words, a depiction of Stalin ‘as a man of colossal grandiosity’ who had ‘a profound insecurity that caused him to need constant affirmation of his imagined greatness’.4
Evidence cited by Khrushchev and highlighted by Tucker was Stalin’s editing of his official Soviet biography, in which he marked passages containing insufficient praise. Like many of Khrushchev’s claims about Stalin, this was way off the mark. Stalin did indeed edit the second, postwar edition of his Short Biography but he actually toned down the adulation and insisted that other revolutionaries should be accorded more prominence. The same was true of many other texts that Stalin edited. While Stalin had a high opinion of himself, it fell far short of the extremities of his personality cult.
Stalin’s own view of his family history was much more relaxed than many of his biographers. In a March 1938 speech to a meeting of high-ranking air force officers, he used his own background to illustrate the point that class credentials were no guarantee of honesty. Workers could be scoundrels and non-proletarians could be good people:
For example, I’m not the son of workers. My father was not born a worker. He was a master with apprentices, he was an exploiter. We didn’t live badly. I was ten when he went bust and had to join the proletariat. I couldn’t say that he was glad to join the workers. He cursed his bad luck all the time, but for me it turned out to be a good thing. For sure, that is funny [laughter]. When I was ten I was not happy that my father had lost everything. I didn’t know that 40 years later it would be a plus for me. But in no way was it an advantage I had earned.5
SOSO THE STUDIOUS
Stalin’s benign recollection chimes with the views of those historians who believe he had a relatively privileged childhood. While both his parents had been born serfs and his family was not well off, it was not among the poorest and it had the connections to secure Stalin entry into a church school in his home-town of Gori in Georgia and then into a prestigious seminary in the province’s capital, Tbilisi. His father had a drink problem and his parents’ marriage broke up, but he was the only surviving child of a doting and strong-willed mother who wanted him to become a priest. As a young child, Stalin, or Soso as he was then called, suffered from smallpox and was left with a permanently pockmarked face. He also had an abnormality which reduced the use of his left arm, a condition that may have been genetic or the result of an accident. Adding to Soso’s woes was an accident he had aged eleven, when a runaway horse-drawn carriage ran over his legs, which left him with a permanently inhibited gait.