CHAPTER 2
THE SEARCH FOR THE STALIN BIOGRAPHERS’ STONE
Stalin kept no diary, wrote no memoirs and evinced little interest in his personal history, yet he went to a great deal of trouble to shape both his biography and the documentary trail that would be followed by his biographers.1
‘It is difficult to describe the process,’ Stalin told an admiring American visitor, Jerome Davis, in 1926, when asked how he became a Bolshevik. ‘First one becomes convinced that existing conditions are wrong and unjust. Then one resolves to do the best one can to remedy them. Under the Tsar’s regime any attempt genuinely to help the people put one outside the pale of the law; one found himself hunted and hounded as a revolutionist.’2
Emil Ludwig, a German writer who had authored many biographies of famous people, asked Stalin a similar question in 1931, and received an equally terse and uninformative reply:
Ludwig: What drove you to become a rebel? Was it, perhaps, because your parents treated you badly?
Stalin: No. My parents were uneducated people, but they did not treat me badly by any means. It was different in the theological seminary of which I was then a student. In protest against the humiliating regime and the Jesuitical methods that prevailed in the seminary, I was ready to become, and eventually did become, a revolutionary, a believer in Marxism as the only genuinely revolutionary doctrine.3
In 1939 the Soviet dramatist Mikhail Bulgakov wanted to write a play about Stalin’s youth, with the intention to stage it as part of the celebrations of Stalin’s sixtieth birthday. But Stalin vetoed the project, saying that ‘all young people are alike, why write a play about the young Stalin?’4
Stalin was occasionally more forthcoming about his early life, but not his childhood. It was the years he spent in the Bolshevik underground, a period that spanned his youth and early adulthood, that interested him. He loved to read and reflect on his writings from that time and to the end of his life remained engaged with the debates, splits, strategies, tactics and factional battles of Russia’s revolutionary socialist movement. In the 1920s he marked copiously those volumes of the first edition of Lenin’s collected works that dealt with the 1905 revolution. After the Second World War he reread with evident interest his own 1905 article on ‘The Proletarian Class and the Proletarian Party’, which had been republished in the first volume of his collected works. It was about the rules of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party and Stalin took the trouble to write out at the end of his article the three conditions of party membership: agreement with its programme, material support and participation in one of its organisations. Heavily marked, too, was his copy of Georgy Safarov’s detailed 1923 study of the pre-1917 evolution of Bolshevik strategy and tactics.5
For Stalin, the party’s history was not even past, let alone dead. His formative, life-changing experiences as an illegal political activist in Tsarist Russia remained eternally interesting and relevant. Speaking to visiting Indian communists in 1951, he was keen to share lessons he had learned decades earlier. He urged them to eschew the tactics of the peasant-based revolution that had recently brought the Chinese communists to power and instead to emulate the worker–peasant alliance that had secured victory for the Bolsheviks. He warned of the dangers of premature uprisings, pointing out that in July 1917 the Bolsheviks had restrained an insurrectionary workers’ movement in Petrograd because it would have been defeated by counter-revolutionary forces. He argued against individual acts of terrorism, which had the effect of dividing the progressive movement into the heroes of such actions and the crowds who cheered them from the sidelines but did not themselves participate in revolutionary struggles. ‘We are against the theory of the hero and the crowd,’ he told them.6
Winston Churchill famously said in relation to Stalin’s foreign policy: ‘I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’ Less often quoted is what he said next: ‘But perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.’7
This was in October 1939 and Churchill was explaining to the listeners of his BBC radio broadcast why, on the eve of the Second World War, Stalin had concluded a non-aggression pact with Hitler and then joined in the German attack on Poland. Churchill’s hope was that Soviet national interest and the Nazi threat would eventually lead Stalin to break with Hitler. In the event, the relationship was broken by Hitler when he launched his invasion of the USSR in June 1941.
The enigma of Stalin’s pre-revolutionary years is that while quite a lot is known about his political views and activities, a great deal of uncertainty surrounds the details of his family life, education, personal relations and youthful character traits. Gaps in the evidence have typically been filled in by speculation, stereotyping and cherry-picking of partisan memoirs to suit the grinding of many different personal and political axes. ‘When it comes to Stalin,’ writes the foremost biographer of his early life, Ronald Suny, ‘gossip is reported as fact; legend provides meaning; and scholarship gives way to sensationalist popular literature with tangential reference to reliable sources.’8
STALIN’S BIOGRAPHY: THE SEARCH BEGINS
In December 1920 Stalin handwrote his answers to a biographical questionnaire, sent to him by the Swedish branch of ROSTA, the forerunner of the TASS news agency:
1. Name: Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (Dzhugashvili)
2. Year and Place of Birth: 1878, Gori (Tbilisi Province)
3. Origins: Georgian. Father was a worker (shoemaker), died in 1909, Mother, a seamstress, is still alive
4. Education: Excluded from the sixth (final) class of the Tbilisi Orthodox Seminary in 1899
5. How long have you been involved in the revolutionary movement? Since 1897
6. How long have you been in the RSDLP [Russian Social Democratic Labour Party] and in the Bolshevik faction? Joined the RSDLP in 1898 and the Bolshevik faction in 1903 (when it was formed), 1898 – member of the Tbilisi committee of the party, 1903 – member of the Caucasus regional committee of the party, 1912 – member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party
7. Were you ever a member of any other revolutionary party? No. Before 1898 I was an RSDLP sympathiser
8. Penalties that you suffered under Tsarism – imprisonment, exile, emigration: Arrested seven times, exiled six times (Irkutsk, Narym, Turukhansk etc.), escaped exile five times, served seven years in prison, lived illegally in Russia until 1917 (was in St Petersburg, not in emigration but did visit London, Berlin, Stockholm and Cracow on party business)
9. What official posts have you occupied in Soviet Russia? People’s Commissar of the Workers and Peasants Inspectorate and People’s Commissar for Nationalities, member of the Council of Labour and Defence and of the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Republic, member of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee
10. Literary activities. Books, pamphlets, major articles. What newspapers and journals have you edited? Pamphlets: (1) About the Bolsheviks (in Georgian) 1904, (2) Anarchism or Socialism? (in Georgian) 1906, (3) Marxism and the National Question (in Russian) 1913. Edited the Georgian Bolshevik newspaper ‘New Times’ (1906), and Russian newspapers: ‘The Baku Proletarian’ (1908), ‘The Star’ in St Petersburg [at the time of the Lena massacre] (1912) and the central party organ ‘The Worker’s Way’ during the days of Kerensky in 1917