Stalin is said to have been the leader of a children’s street-gang in Gori but, as Stephen Kotkin has pointed out, Soso was one of the town’s best pupils. Far from being a street ruffian, he was a dedicated ‘bookworm’ and ‘autodidact’, which turned out to be a lifelong trait.6 This fundamental fact about Stalin’s early life was captured in a cult painting by the Georgian artist Apollon Kutateladze, Comrade Stalin with Mother (1930), which shows a well-dressed, studious boy reading a book, while being overlooked by an encouraging and supportive mother.
Born in 1878, Stalin entered the church school in Gori in 1888, having passed the entrance exam with flying colours. According to his mother, Keke, Soso was a good boy who ‘studied hard, was always reading and talking, trying to find out everything’.7 He excelled at singing and was known among his teachers as bulbuli (the nightingale). Keke was a devout Christian, and so was her son. As one of his schoolmates recalled, Stalin ‘was very believing, punctually attending all the divine services’. According to the same informant, ‘Books were Joseph’s inseparable friends; he would not part with them even at meal times.’8
Because he was such a good pupil, the church assembly waived tuition fees, gave him free textbooks and a stipend of three roubles a month. He was also awarded an inscribed Georgian version of the Psalms, the davitni, that praised him as an intelligent and successful pupil. Soso matriculated in May 1894 and on the basis of his results was recommended for entry into a seminary. His marks were (with five being the highest):
Conduct: 5
Sacred History and Catechism: 5
Liturgical Exegesis and Ecclesiastical Typikon: 5
Russian, Church Slavonic and Georgian: 5
Greek and Arithmetic: 4
Geography and Handwriting: 5
Liturgical Chant: 59
That same year, Stalin took his first step on the road to his revolutionary conversion when he visited a recently opened radical bookshop in Gori. There, in its reading room, he encountered an alternative literature to that prescribed by the school, notably the classics of Georgian and Russian literature.
At fifteen, Stalin moved to the capital to enter the Tbilisi Spiritual Seminary which, like his school, was run by the Georgian branch of the Russian Orthodox Church. There were two such seminaries in Tbilisi, one for Georgians and the other for Armenians; both were reserved for bright boys destined for the priesthood. He did very well in the entrance exams, excelling across the board in Bible studies, church Slavonic, Russian, Greek, catechism, geography and penmanship (though not in arithmetic), and was awarded a state subsidy. As Robert Service has commented, Stalin’s biographers have tended to underrate the high-quality education he received from the Orthodox Church.10
The Georgian seminary had only recently reopened after being shut for a year because of a protest strike about student conditions and restrictions. By the time Stalin arrived at the seminary, there was a well-established tradition of student protest and intellectual rebellion. Students especially resented the ‘Russification’ policies implemented by the church authorities, which included teaching only through the medium of Russian and suppressing any study of Georgia’s language, history and culture.
In Soso’s class were students who should have started the year before as well as nine other boys from his school in Gori. Stalin did well academically, scoring fours and fives in most of his subjects, even though the instruction was in Russian, a foreign language with which he was still grappling. Among the secular subjects studied by Stalin were Russian history and literature, logic, psychology, physics, geometry and algebra. Diligent and obedient, he still found the time and spirit to write some patriotic poetry (in Georgian) that he submitted to a nationalist newspaper called Iveria.
Five poems were published in 1895 under the pen-name of ‘Soselo’. In the longest, ‘To the Moon’, which had six four-line stanzas, the boy Stalin wrote:
Know well, those who once
Fell to the oppressors
Will rise again with hope
Above the holy mountain
His life as a poet was short lived. Another poem was published in 1896 in a Georgian progressive newspaper, and that was it.11 In Soviet times his poems were secretly translated into Russian, but there was no question of them being published or included in his collected works. They were far too nationalistic. For Stalin, the political utility of literature was always paramount and their publication would have served no purpose except to complicate his life story. Or, maybe, they no longer pleased him aesthetically and didn’t translate well into Russian.
In 1896–7 Soso joined a secret study group organised by an older seminarian, Seit Devdariani. According to Devdariani, the plan was to study natural science, sociology, Georgian, Russian and European literature and the works of Marx and Engels. This subversive involvement impacted on Stalin’s grades, which dropped to twos and threes.12
One source of forbidden secular books was the Georgian Literary Society’s ‘Cheap Library’ run by Iveria editor Ilia Chavchavadze. In November 1896 the seminary inspector wrote in the conduct book: ‘It appears that Dzhugashvili has a ticket to the Cheap Library, from which he borrows books. Today I confiscated Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea in which I found the said library ticket.’ In response the principal confined Stalin to the punishment cell for a ‘prolonged period’, noting that he had already warned him about the possession of Hugo’s book on the French Revolution, Ninety-Three. Another entry into the conduct book, dated March 1897, stated:
At 11 p.m. I took away from Joseph Dzhugashvili Letourneau’s Literary Evolution of the Nations, which he had borrowed from the Cheap Library . . . Dzhugashvili was discovered reading the said book on the chapel stairs. This is the thirteenth time this student has been discovered reading books borrowed from the Cheap Library.13
One writer favoured by rebellious students like Soso was the Georgian Alexander Qazbegi, whose fictional hero Koba was an outlaw who resisted Russian rule in Georgia. That character provided Soso with his first pseudonym when he joined the illegal revolutionary underground. Not until 1913 did Koba become the more Bolshevik-sounding Stalin – the ‘man of steel’.
According to his official Soviet Short Biography (1939), Stalin led Marxist study circles in his third and fourth years at the seminary and it was this subversive activity that led him to join the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1898 and then to his expulsion from the seminary in May 1899. However, as Alfred J. Rieber has highlighted, the seminary’s records show Soso was a troublesome student but not a radical activist.14 He was not expelled from the seminary for political activity but dismissed for failing to appear at examinations.15 When Soso dropped out, the seminary issued him with a document testifying to his good behaviour during his four years as a student priest. Four months later the seminary authorities, at Soso’s own request, issued a final report card on him, which showed a marked improvement in his grades.16
Exegesis of the Holy Script: 4
History of the Bible: 4
Ecclesiastical history: 3
Homiletics: 3
Russian literature: 4
History of Russian literature: 4
Universal secular history: 4
Russian secular history: 4
Algebra: 4
Geometry: 4
Easter liturgy: 4
Physics: 4
Logic: 5
Psychology: 4