Part One
THAT WONDERFUL TIME
Stalin and Nadya
1878–1932
1. THE GEORGIAN AND THE SCHOOLGIRL
Nadya and Stalin had been married for fourteen years but it extended deeper and longer than that, so steeped was their marriage in Bolshevism. They had shared the formative experiences of the underground life and intimacy with Lenin during the Revolution, then the Civil War. Stalin had known her family for nearly thirty years and he had first met her in 1904 when she was three. He was then twenty-five and he had been a Marxist for six years.
Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili was not born on 21 December 1879, Stalin’s official birthday. “Soso” was actually born in a tiny shack (that still exists) to Vissarion, or “Beso,” and his wife Ekaterina, “Keke,” née Geladze, over a year earlier on 6 December 1878. They lived in Gori, a small town beside the Kura River in the romantic, mountainous and defiantly un-Russian province of Georgia, a small country thousands of miles from the Tsar’s capitaclass="underline" it was closer to Baghdad than St. Petersburg.[7] Westerners often do not realize how foreign Georgia was: an independent kingdom for millennia with its own ancient language, traditions, cuisine, literature, it was only consumed by Russia in gulps between 1801 and 1878. With its sunny climate, clannish blood feuds, songs and vineyards, it resembles Sicily more than Siberia.
Soso’s father was a violent, drunken semi-itinerant cobbler who savagely beat both Soso and Keke. She in turn, as the child later recalled, “thrashed him mercilessly.” Soso once threw a dagger at his father. Stalin reminisced how Beso and Father Charkviani, the local priest, indulged in drinking bouts together to the fury of his mother: “Father, don’t make my husband a drunk, it’ll destroy my family.” Keke threw out Beso. Stalin was proud of her “strong willpower.” When Beso later forcibly took Soso to work as a cobbling apprentice in Tiflis, Keke’s priests helped get him back.
Stalin’s mother took in washing for local merchants. She was pious and became close to the priests who protected her. But she was also earthy and spicy: she may have made the sort of compromises that are tempting for a penniless single mother, becoming the mistress of her employers. This inspired the legends that often embroider the paternity of famous men. It is possible that Stalin was the child of his godfather, an affluent innkeeper, officer and amateur wrestler named Koba Egnatashvili. Afterwards, Stalin protected Egnatashvili’s two sons, who remained friends until his death and reminisced in old age about Egnatashvili’s wrestling prowess. Nonetheless, one sometimes has to admit that great men are the children of their own fathers. Stalin was said to resemble Beso uncannily. Yet he himself once asserted that his father was a priest.
Stalin was born with the second and third toes of his left foot joined. He suffered a pock-marked face from an attack of smallpox and later damaged his left arm, possibly in a carriage accident. He grew up into a sallow, stocky, surly youth with speckled honey-coloured eyes and thick black hair—a kinto, Georgian street urchin. He was exceptionally intelligent with an ambitious mother who wanted him to be a priest, perhaps like his real father. Stalin later boasted that he learned to read at five by listening to Father Charkviani teaching the alphabet. The five-year-old then helped Charkviani’s thirteen-year-old daughter with her reading.
In 1888, he entered the Gori Church School and then, triumphantly, in 1894, won a “five rouble scholarship” to the Tiflis Seminary in the Georgian capital. As Stalin later told a confidant, “My father found out that along with the scholarship, I also earned money (five roubles a month) as a choirboy… and once I went out and saw him standing there: “ ‘Young man, sir,’ said Beso, ‘you’ve forgotten your father… Give me at least three roubles, don’t be as mean as your mother!’
“‘Don’t shout!’ replied Soso. ‘If you don’t leave immediately, I’ll call the watchman!’” Beso slunk away.[8] He apparently died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1909.
Stalin sometimes sent money to help his mother but henceforth kept his distance from Keke whose dry wit and rough discipline resembled his own. There has been too much cod-psychology about Stalin’s childhood but this much is certain: raised in a poor priest-ridden household, he was damaged by violence, insecurity and suspicion but inspired by the local traditions of religious dogmatism, blood-feuding and romantic brigandry. “Stalin did not like to speak about his parents and childhood” but it is meaningless to over-analyse his psychology. He was emotionally stunted and lacked empathy yet his antennae were supersensitive. He was abnormal but Stalin himself understood that politicians are rarely normaclass="underline" History, he wrote later, is full of “abnormal people.”
The seminary provided his only formal education. This boarding school’s catechismic teaching and “Jesuitical methods” of “surveillance, spying, invasion of the inner life, the violation of people’s feelings” repelled, but impressed, Soso so acutely that he spent the rest of his life refining their style and methods. It stimulated this autodidact’s passion for reading but he became an atheist in the first year. “I got some friends,” he said, “and a bitter debate started between the believers and us!” He soon embraced Marxism.
In 1899, he was expelled from the seminary, joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party and became a professional revolutionary, adopting the nom de revolution Koba, inspired by the hero of a novel, The Parricide, by Alexander Kazbegi, a dashing, vindictive Caucasian outlaw. He combined the “science” of Marxism with his soaring imagination: he wrote romantic poetry, published in Georgian, before working as a weatherman at the Tiflis Meteorological Institute, the only job he held before becoming one of the rulers of Russia in 1917.
“Koba” was convinced by the universal panacea of Marxism, “a philosophical system” that suited the obsessive totality of his character. The class struggle also matched his own melodramatic pugnacity. The paranoid secrecy of the intolerant and idiosyncratic Bolshevik culture dovetailed with Koba’s own self-contained confidence and talent for intrigue. Koba plunged into the underworld of revolutionary politics that was a seething, stimulating mixture of conspiratorial intrigue, ideological nitpicking, scholarly education, factional games, love affairs with other revolutionaries, police infiltration and organizational chaos. These revolutionaries hailed from every background—Russians, Armenians, Georgians and Jews, workers, noblemen, intellectuals and daredevils—and organized strikes, printing presses, meetings and heists. United in the obsessional study of Marxist literature, there was always a division between the educated bourgeois émigrés, like Lenin himself, and the rough men of action in Russia itself. The underground life, always itinerant and dangerous, was the formative experience not only of Stalin but of all his comrades. This explains much that happens later.1
In 1902, Koba won the spurs of his first arrest and Siberian exile, the first of seven such exiles from which he escaped six times. These exiles were far from Stalin’s brutal concentration camps: the Tsars were inept policemen. They were almost reading holidays in distant Siberian villages with one part-time gendarme on duty, during which revolutionaries got to know (and hate) each other, corresponded with their comrades in Petersburg or Vienna, discussed abstruse questions of dialectical materialism, and had affairs with local girls. When the call of freedom or revolution became urgent, they escaped, yomping across the taiga to the nearest train. In exile, Koba’s teeth, a lifelong source of pain, began to deteriorate.
7
This was not lost on another peasant boy who was born only a few hundred miles from Gori: Saddam Hussein. A Kurdish leader, Mahmoud Osman, who negotiated with him, observed that Saddam’s study and bedroom were filled with books on Stalin. Today, Stalin’s birthplace, the hut in Gori, is embraced magnificently by a white-pillared marble temple built by Lavrenti Beria and remains the centrepiece of Stalin Boulevard, close to the Stalin Museum.
8
I am grateful to Gela Charkviani for sharing with me the unpublished but fascinating manuscript of the memoirs of his father, Candide Charkviani, First Secretary of the Georgian Party, 1938–1951. In old age, Stalin spent hours telling Charkviani about his childhood. Charkviani writes that he tried to find Beso’s grave in the Tiflis cemetery but could not. He found photographs meant to show Beso and asked Stalin to identify him, but Stalin stated that these did not show his father. It is therefore unlikely that the usual photograph said to show Beso is correct. On Stalin’s paternity, the Egnatashvili family emphatically deny that the innkeeper was Stalin’s father.